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Book 



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iSibetie^iDc oEtiition 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN 

BEING VOLUME IV. 

OF 

EMERSON'S COMPLETE WORKS 



REPRESENTATIVE MEN 



SEVEN LECTURES 



BY 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



Btto anU EetotgcU (^nition 




VOL. 

IS THE 

pkopbkt 

OF THE 

m Slate 



BOSTON 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 

1892 



75 /Lz/ 
J/ 



Copyright, 1876, 
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
Br EDWARD W. EMERSON. 

All rights reserved. 



^ Traigfer 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by U. 0. Houghton & Company. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. Uses op Great Men 7 

II. Plato ; or, The Philosopher .... 39 
Plato : New Readings . . . . • . 78 

III. SWEDENBORG ; OR, ThE MySTIC .... 89 

IV. Montaigne ; or, The Skeptic . . . .141 
V. Shakspeare ; or, The Poet . . . . 179 

VI. Napoleon; or, The Man of the World . .211 
VII. Goethe : or, The Writer ..... 247 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 



I. 

USES OF GEEAT MEN. 



It is natural to believe in great men. If the 
companions of our childhood should turn out to be 
heroes, and their condition regal, it would not sur- 
prise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and 
the circumstance is high and poetic ; that is, their 
genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gau- 
tama,»the first men ate the earth and found it deli- 
ciously sweet. 

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The 
world is upheld by the veracity of good men : they 
make the earth wholesome. They who lived with 
them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet 
and tolerable only in our belief in such society ; 
and, actually or ideally, we manage to live with 
superiors. We call our children and our lands by 
their names. Their names are wrought into the 
verbs of language, their works and effigies are in 
our houses, and every circumstance of the day re- 
calls an anecdote of them. 

The search after the great man is the dream of 



10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. 
We travel into foreign parts to find his works, — 
if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are 
put off with fortune instead. You say, the Eng- 
lish are practical ; the Germans are hospitable ; in 
Valencia the climate is delicious ; and in the hills 
of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. 
Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich 
and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that 
cost too much. But if there were any magnet that 
would point to the countries and houses where are 
the persons who are intrinsically rich and power- 
ful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on 
the road to-day. 

The race goes with us on their credit. The 
knowledge that in the city is a man who invented 
the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. 
But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are 
disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or 
of fleas, — the more, the worse. 

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these 
patrons. The gods of fable are the shining mo- 
ments of great men. We run all our vessels into 
one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, 
Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the neces- 
sary and structural action of the human mind. 
The student of history is like a man going into a 
warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 11 

has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall 
find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and 
rosettes which are found on the interior walls of 
the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purifi- 
cation of the human mind. Man can paint, or 
make, or think, nothing but man. He believes 
that the great material elements had their origin 
from his thought. And our philosophy finds one 
essence collected or distributed. 

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of 
service we derive from others, let us be warned of 
the dange]^ of modern studies, and begin low 
enough. We must not contend against love, or 
deny the substantial existence of other people. I 
know not what would happen to us. We have so- 
cial strengths. Our affection towards others cre- 
ates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing 
will supply. I can do that by another which I can- 
not do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first 
say to myself. Other men are lenses through 
which we read our own minds. Each man seeks 
those of different quality from his own, and such 
as are good of their kind ; that is, he seeks other 
men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, 
the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality 
pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main 
difference betwixt men is, whether they attend theii 



12 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous 
plant which grows, like the palm, from within out- 
ward. His own affair, though impossible to others, 
Ae can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy 
to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. IVe 
' take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap 
that which of itself will fall into our hands.' I 
count him a great man who inhabits a higher 
sphere of thought, into which other men rise with 
labor and difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to 
see things in a true light and in large relations, 
whilst they must make painful corrections and 
keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His 
service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful 
person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes ; 
yet how splendid is that benefit ! It costs no more 
for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. 
And every one can do his best thing easiest. '''Peu 
de moyens^ heaucoup d'effSt'''^ He is great wdio 
is what he is from nature, and who never reminds 
us of others. 

But he must be related to us, and our life receive 
from him some promise of explanation. I cannot 
tell what I would know ; but I have observed there 
are persons who, in their character and actions, an- 
swer questions which I have not skiU to put. One 
man answers some question which none of his con- 
temporaries put, and is isolated. The past and 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 13 

passing religions and philosophies answer some 
other question. Certain men affect us as rich pos- 
sibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their 
times, — the sport perhaps of some instinct that 
rules in the air ; — they do no^ speak to our want. 
But the great are near ; we know them at sight. 
They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What 
is good is effective, generative; makes for itself 
room, food and allies. A sound apple produces 
seed, — a hybrid dbes not. Is a man in his place, 
he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating ar- 
mies with his purpose, which is thus executed. 
The river makes its own shores, and each legiti- 
mate idea makes its own channels and welcome, — 
harvests for food, institutions for expression, weap- 
ons to fight with and disciples to explain it. I The 
true artist has the planet for his pedestal ; the ad- 
venturer, after years of strife, has nothing broader 
than his own shoes. 

Our coimnon discourse respects two kinds of 
use or service from superior men. Direct giving 
is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct 
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, 
eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical 
power and prophecy. The boy believes there is 
a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches 
believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we 
are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is 



14 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The 
aid we have from others is mechanical compared 
with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus 
learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect 
remains. Eight ethics are central and go from the 
soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the 
universe. Serving others is serving us. I must 
absolve me to myself. ' Mind thy affair,' says the 
spirit : — ' coxcomb, would you meddle with the 
skies, or with other people ? ' Indirect service is 
left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, 
and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Sweden- 
borg saw that things were representative. Men 
are also representative; first, of things, and sec- 
ondly, of ideas. 

As plants convert the minerals into food for 
animals, so each man converts some raw material 
in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, 
electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, 
cotton ; the makers of tools ; the inventor of deci- 
mal notation ; the geometer ; the engineer ; the 
musician, — severally make an easy way for all, 
through unl^nown and impossible confusions. Each 
man is by secret liking connected with some district 
of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is ; as 
Linnseus, of plants ; Huber, of bees ; Fries, of 
lichens ; Van Mons, of pears ; Dalton, of atomic 
forms ; Euclid, of lines ; Newton, of fluxions. 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 15 

A man is a centre for nature, running out threads 
of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, 
material and elemental. The earth rolls ; every 
clod and stone comes to the meridian : so every 
organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its 
relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn 
comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each cre- 
ated thing its lover and* poet. Justice has already 
been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to 
loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton ; but how 
few materials are yet used by our arts ! The mass 
of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expec- 
tant. It would seem as if each waited, like the 
enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined 
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and 
walk forth to the day in human shape. In the 
history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems 
to have fashioned a brain for itseK. A magnet 
must be made man in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, 
or Oersted, before the general mind can come to 
entertain its powers. 

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, 
a sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic 
kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes 
up as the charm of nature, — the glitter of the 
spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. 
Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and 
food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle 



16 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

US round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their 
agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The 
eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things, — 
" He saw that they were good." We know where 
to find them ; and these performers are relished all 
the more, after a little experience of the pretending 
races. We are entitled also to higher advantageso 
Something is wanting to science until it has been 
humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, 
and its vital play in botany, music, optics and archi- 
tecture, another. There are advancements to num- 
bers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus- 
pected at first, when, by union with intellect and 
will, they ascend into the life and reappear in 
conversation, character and politics. 

But this comes later. We speak now only of 
our acquaintance with them in their own sphere 
and the way in which they seem to fascinate and 
draw to them some genius who occupies himself 
with one thing, all his life long. The possibility 
of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer 
with the observed. Each material thing has its 
celestial side ; has its translation, through humanity, 
into the spiritual and necessary sphere where it 
plays a part as indestructible as any other. And 
to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. 
The gases gather to the solid firmament: the 
chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows j 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 17 

arrives at the quadruped, and walks ; arrives at 
the man, and thinks. But also the constituency 
determines the vote of the representative. He is 
not only representative, but participant. Like can 
only be known by like. The reason why he knows 
about them is that he is of them ; he has just como 
out of nature, or from being a part of that thing. 
Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate 
zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes his career ; and 
he can variously publish their virtues, because they 
compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, 
does not forget his origin ; and all that is yet inan- 
imate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished 
nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we 
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innu- 
merable Werners, Von Buchs and Beaumonts, and 
the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution 
I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys ? 

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the 
poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence sup- 
plies the imbecility of our condition. In one of 
those celestial days when heaven and earth meet 
and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we 
can only spend it once : we wish for a thousand 
heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate 
its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is 
this fancy ? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied 
by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors I 



18 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Every ship that comes to America got its chart 
from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Ho- 
mer. Every carpenter who shaves with a fore- 
plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. 
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the 
contributions of men who have perished to add 
their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, 
jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every 
man, inasmuch as he has any science, — is a definer 
and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of 
our condition. These road-makers on every hand 
enrich us. We must extend the area of life and 
multiply our relations. We are as much gainers 
by finding a new property in the old earth as by 
acquiring a new planet. 

We are too passive in the reception of these ma- 
terial or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks 
and stomachs. To ascend one step, — we are bet- 
ter served through our sympathy. Activity is con- 
tagious. Looking where others look, and convers- 
ing with the same things, we catch the charm which 
lured them. Napoleon said, " You must not fight 
too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all 
your art of war." Talk much with any man of 
vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit 
of looking at things in the same light, and on each 
occurrence we anticipate his thought. 
I Men are helpful through the intellect and the 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 19 

affections. Other help I find a false appearance. 
If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive 
that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves 
me as it found me, neither better nor worse : but 
all mental and moral force is a positive good. It 
goes out from you, whether you will or not, and 
profits me whom you never thought of. [ I cannot 
even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great 
power of performance, without fresh resolution. 
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil's 
saying of Sir Walter Kaleigh, "I know that he 
can toil terribly," is an electric touch. So are 
Clarendon's portraits, — of Hampden, " who was 
of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or 
wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to 
be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and 
of a personal courage equal to his best parts ; " — 
of Falkland, ".who was so severe an adorer of 
truth, that he could as easily have given liimself 
leave to steal, as to dissemble." We cannot read 
Plutarch without a tingling of the blood ; and I 
accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius : " A sage 
is the instructor of a hmidred ages. When the 
manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become in- 
telligent, and the wavering, determined." 

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard 
for departed men to touch the quick like our own 
companions, whose names may not last as long. 



20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

What is he whom I never think of? Whilst in 
every solitude are those who succor our genius and 
stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a 
power in love to divine another's destiny better 
than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, 
hold him to his task. What has friendship so sig- 
nal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is 
in us ? We will never more think cheaply of our- 
selves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, 
and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will 
not again shame us. 

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure 
as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the 
day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, 
Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear 
the shouts in the street ! The people cannot see him 
enougho They* delight in a man. Here is a head 
and a trunk ! What a front ! what eyes ! Atlan- 
tean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with 
equal inward force to guide the great machine ! 
This pleasure of full expression to that which, in 
their private experience is usually cramped and 
obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the se- 
cret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Toothing 
is kept back. There is lire enough ^ to fuse the 
mountain of ore. Shakspeare's principal merit 
may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best 
understands the English language, and can say 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 21 

what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and 
floodgates of expression are only health or fortu- 
nate constitution. Shakspeare's name suggests 
other and purely intellectual benefits. 

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, wi'v.h 
their medals, swords and armorial coats, like the 
addressing to a human being thoughts out of a 
certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. 
This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse 
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually 
pays ; contented if now and then in a century the 
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of 
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and con- 
fectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of 
ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of 
the supersensible regions, and draws their map ; 
and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, 
cools our affection for the old. These are at once 
accepted as the reality, of which the world we have 
conversed with is the show. 

We go to the gymnasium and the swimmings 
school to see the power and beauty of the body ; 
there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from 
witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds ; as feats 
of memory, of mathematical combination, great 
power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imag- 
ination, even versatility and concentration, — as 
these acts expose the invisible organs and members 



22 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of the mind, which respond, member for member, 
to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new 
gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest 
marks, taught, with Plato, " to choose those who 
can, without aid from the eyes or any other sense, 
proceed to truth and to being." Foremost among 
these activities are the summersaults, spells and 
resurrections wrought by the imagination. When 
this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or 
a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious 
sense of indeterminate size and inspires an auda- 
cious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas 
of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word 
dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and 
instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and 
our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this bene- 
fit is real because we are entitled to these enlarge- 
ments, and once having passed the bounds shall 
never again be quite the miserable pedants we were. 
The high functions of the intellect are so allied 
that some imaginative power usually appears in 
all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the 
first class, but especially in meditative men of an 
intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so 
that they have the perception of identity and the 
perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shak- 
speare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either 
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 23 

kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little 
through failure to see them. 

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de- 
light in reason degenerates into idolatry of the 
herald. Especially when a mind of powerful 
method has instructed men, we find the examples 
of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the 
Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Ba- 
con, of Locke ; — in religion the history of hie- 
rarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken 
the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! 
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men 
is always inviting the impudence of power. It is 
the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind 
the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us 
from itseK. True genius will not impoverish, but 
will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man 
should appear in our village he would create, in 
those who conversed with him, a new consciousness 
of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved ad- 
vantages ; he would establish a sense of immovable 
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not 
be cheated ; as every one would discern the checks 
and guaranties of condition. The rich would see 
their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes 
and their resources. 

But nature brings all this about in due time. 
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of 



24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say 
of a domestic who has been valuable, " She had 
lived with me long enough." We are tendencies, 
or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We 
touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Ro- 
tation is the law of nature. When nature removes 
a great man, people explore the horizon for a suc- 
cessor ; but none comes, and none will. His class 
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite 
different field the next man will appear ; not Jef- 
ferson, not Franklin, but now a great salesman, 
then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, 
then a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage 
Western general. Thus we make a stand against 
our rougher masters ; but against the best there is 
a finer remedy. The power which they communi- 
cate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, 
we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to 
which also Plato was debtor. 

I must not forget that we have a special debt 
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. 
Between rank and rank of our great men are 
wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached 
themselves to a few persons who either by the 
quality of that idea they embodied or by the large- 
ness of their reception were entitled to the posi- 
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the 
qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the ecu- 



USES OF GREAT MEN, 25 

stitution of tMngs. "We swim, day by day, on a 
river of delusions and are effectually amused with 
houses and towns in the air, of which the men 
about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In 
lucid intervals we say, * Let there be an entrance 
opened for me into realities ; I have worn the fool's 
cap too long.' We will know the meaning of our 
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and 
if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, 
let us read off the strains. We have been cheated 
of our reason ; yet there have been sane men, who 
enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they 
know, they know for us. With each new mind, 
a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the 
Bible be closed until the last great man is born. 
These men correct the delirium of the animal 
spirits, make us considerate and engage us to 
new aims and powers. The veneration of man- 
kind selects these for the highest place. Witness 
the multitude of statues, pictures and memorials 
which recall their genius in every city, village, 
house and ship : — 

" Ever their phantoms arise before us, 
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood; 
At bed and table they lord it o'er us 
With looks of beauty and words of good." 

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, 
the service rendered by those who introduce moral 



26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

truths into the general mind ? — I am plagued, 
in aU my living, with a perpetual tarijff of prices. 
If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, 
I am well enough entertained, and could continue 
indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes 
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this 
precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New 
York and run up and down on my affairs: they j 
are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the I 
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling 
advantage. I remember the peau d'dne on whic. . 
whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece ot \i , 
the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a con- 
vention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I 
cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there 
should appear in the company some gentle soul 
who knows little of persons or parties, of Caro- - 
lina or Cuba, but who announces a law that dis- ; 
poses these particulars, and so certifies me of 5 
the equity which checkmates every false player, ; 
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of , 
my independence on any conditions of country, ^ 
or time, or human body, — that man liberates me ; * 
I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation 
to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am 
made immortal by apprehencling my possession 
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition 
of rich and poor. We live in a market, where 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 27 

in only so much wheat, or wool, or land ; and if 
I have so much more, every other must have so 
much less. I seem to have no good without 
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the 
gladness of another, and our system is one of 
war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of 
the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It 
is our system ; and a man comes to measure his 
greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his 
competitors. But in these new fields there is room : 
here are no self-esteems, no exclusions. 

I admire gi-eat men of all classes, those who 
stand for facts, and for thoughts ; I like rough and 
smooth, " Scourges of God," and " Darlings of the 
human race." I like the first Caesar ; and Charles 
v., of Spain ; and Charles XII., of Sweden ; Rich- 
ard Plantagenet ; and Bonaparte, in France. I 
applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his 
office ; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master 
standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand- 
some, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all 
men by fascination into tributaries and supporters 
of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword- 
like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. 
But I find him greater when he can abolish himself 
and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, 
irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresist- 
ible upward force, into our thought, destroying in- 



28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

dividualism ; the power so great that the potentate 
is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a con* 
stitution to his people ; a pontiff who preaches the 
equality of souls and releases his servants from 
their barbarous homages; an emperor who can 
spare his empire. 

But I intended to specify, with a little minute- 
ness, two or three points of service. Nature never 
spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she 
mars her creature with some deformity or defect, 
lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the 
sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the 
ruin and incapable of seeing it, though aU the 
world point their finger at it every day. The 
worthless and offensive members of society, whose 
existence is a social pest, invariably think them- 
selves the most ill-used people alive, and never get 
over their astonishment at the ingratitude and 
selfishness of their contemporaries. Our globe 
discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and 
archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not 
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in 
every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, 
the anger at being waked or changed ? Altogether 
independent of the intellectual force in each is the 
pride of opinion, the security that we are right, 
Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot. 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 29 

but uses what spark of perception and faculty is 
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion 
over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference 
from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one 
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a 
bright thought that made things cohere with this 
bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst 
of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure 
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. 
This is he that should marshall us the way we 
were going. There is no end to his aid. With- 
out Plato we should almost lose our faith in the 
possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to 
want but one, but we want one. We love to 
associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity 
is unlimited ; and, with the great, our thoughts 
and manners easily become great. We are all 
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There 
needs but one wise man in a company and all are 
wise, so rapid is the contagion. 

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes 
from egotism and enable us to see other people and 
their works. But there are vices and follies inci- 
dent to whole populations and ages. Men resem- 
ble their contemporaries even more tjian their prt)^ 
genitors. It is observed in old couples, or in per- 
sons who have been housemates for a course of 
years, that they grow like, and if they should live 



80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

long enough we should not be able to laiow them 
apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which 
threaten to melt the world into a limip, and has- 
tens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The 
like assimilation goes on between men of one town, 
of one sect, of one political party ; and the ideas of 
the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe 
it. Viewed from any high point, this city of New 
York, yonder city of London, the Western civiliza- 
tion, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep 
each other in countenance and exasperate by emu- 
lation the frenzy of the time. The shield against 
the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, 
or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to 
be as wise and good as your companions. We 
learn of our contemporaries what they know, with- 
out effort, and almost through the pores of the 
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife ar- 
rives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her 
husband. But wo stop where they stop. Very 
hardly can we take another step. The great, or 
such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by 
their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from 
these federal errors, and defend us from our con- 
temporaries. They are the exceptions which we 
want, where all grows like. A foreign greatness is 
the antidote for cabalism. 

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves 



USES OF GREAT MEN. SI 

from too much conversation with our mates, and ex- 
ult in the depth of nature in that direction in which 
he leads us. What indemnification is one great 
man for popidations of pigmies ! Every mother 
wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should 
be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the ex- 
cess of influence of the great man. His attractions 
warp us from our place. We have become under- 
lings and intellectual suicides. Ah ! yonder in the 
horizon is our help ; — other great men, new quali- 
ties, counterweights and checks on each other. We 
cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Ev- 
ery hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire 
was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, 
even, " I pray you, let me never hear that man's 
name again." They cry up the virtues of George 
Washington, — " Damn George Washington ! " is 
the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. 
But it is human nature's indispensable defence. 
The centripetence augments the centrifugence. 
We balance one man with his opposite, and the 
health of the state depends on the see-saw. 

There is however a speedy limit to the use of 
heroes. Every genius is defended from approach 
by quantities of unavailableness. They are very 
attractive, and seem at a distance our own : but we 
are hindered on all sides from approach. The 
more we are drawn^ the more we are repelled. 



?:2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

There is sometliing not solid in the good that is 
done for us. The best discovery the discoverer 
makes for himself. It has something unreal for 
his companion until he too has substantiated it. 
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he 
sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not 
communicable to other men, and sending it to per- 
form one more turn through the circle of beings, 
wrote '' JV^ot transferable^' and " Good for (his trip 
only,'' on these garments of the soul. There is 
somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. 
The boundaries are invisible, but they are never 
crossed. There is such good wiU to impart, and 
such good wiU to receive, that each threatens to 
become the other ; but the law of individuality col- 
lects its secret strength : you are you, and I am I, 
and so we remain. 

For nature wishes every thing to remain itself ; 
and whilst every individual strives to grow and ex- 
clude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities 
of the universe, and to impose the law of its being 
on every other creature. Nature steadily aims to 
protect each against every other. Each is self- 
defended. Nothing is more marked than the* 
povv^er by which individuals are guarded from indi- 
viduals, in a world where every benefactor becomes 
so easily a malefactor only by continuation of his 
activity into places where it is not due ; where chiL 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 83 

dren seem so much at the mercy of their foolish 
parents, and where almost all men are too social 
and interfering. We rightly speak of the guar- 
dian angels of children. How superior in their se- 
curity from infusions of evil persons, from vulgar- 
ity and second thought ! They shed their own 
abundant beauty on the objects they behold. 
Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor 
educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them 
they soon come not to mind it and get a self-reli- 
ance ; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn 
the limitation elsewhere. 

We need not fear excessive influence. A more 
generous trust is permitted. Serve the great. 
Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou 
canst render. Be the limb of their body, the 
breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. 
Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and 
nobler ? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism : the 
devotion may easily be greater than the wretched 
pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be an- 
other : not thyself, but a Platonist ; not a soul, but 
a Christian ; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ; not 
a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain, the v/heels of 
tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of in- 
ertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, 
and forever onward ! The microscope observes a 
monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circu- 

VOL, IV. 3 • 



34 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

lating in water. Presently a dot appears on the 
animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes 
two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detach- 
ment appears not less in all thought and in society. 
Children think they cannot live without their par- 
ents. But, long before they are aware of it, the 
black dot has appeared and the detachment taken 
place. Any accident will now reveal to them their 
independence. 

But great men : — the word is injurious. Is 
there caste ? is there fate ? What becomes of the 
promise to virtue ? The thoughtful youth laments 
the superfoetation of nature. ' Generous and hand- 
some,' he says, ' is your hero ; but look at yonder 
poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow ; 
look at his whole nation of Paddies.' Why are 
the masses, from the dawn of history down, food 
for knives and powder ? The idea dignifies a few 
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-de- 
votion ; and they make war and death sacred ; — " 
but what for the wretches whom they hire and 
kill ? The cheapness of man is every day's trag- 
edy. It is as real a loss that others should be 
low as that we should be low ; for we must have 
society. 

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say. Society 
is a Pestalozzian school : all are teachers and pu- 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 35 

pils in turn ? We are equally served by receiving 
and by imparting. Men who know the same things 
are not long the best company for each other. 
But bring to each an intelligent person of another 
experience, and it is as if you let off water from a 
lake by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechan- 
ical advantage, and great benefit it is to each 
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to 
himself. We pass very fast, in our personal 
moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any 
appear never to assume the chair, but always to 
jStand and serve, it is because we do not see the 
3ompany in a sufficiently long period for the whole 
notation of parts to come about. As to what we 
call the masses, and common men, — there are no 
icommon men. All men are at last of a size ; and 
jtrue art is only possible on the conviction that 
Wery talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair 
jplay and an open field and freshest laurels to all 
who have won them ! But heaven reserves an 
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy 
until he has produced his private ray unto the con- 
ave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last 
nobility and exaltation. 

The heroes of the hour are relatively great ; of 
a faster growth ; or they are such in whom, at the 
moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then 
in request. Other days will demand other quali 









86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ties. Some rays escape the common observer, and 
want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man '^i 
there be none greater. His companions are ; and 
not the less great but the more that society cannot 
see them. Nature never sends a great man into 
the planet without confiding the secret to another 
soul. 

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, — 
that there is true ascension in our love. The rep- . 
utations of the nineteenth century will one day be/ 
quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of hu-j 
manity is the real subject whose biography is wrii 
ten in our annals. "We must infer much, and supj 
ply many chasms in ^he record. The history o: 
the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemoni- 
cal. No man, in all the procession of famous men) i 
is reason or illumination or that essence we were '. 
looking for ; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, L 
of new possibilities. Could we one day complettj L 
the immense figure which these flagrant points com-l^ . 
pose ! The study of many individuals leads us to] 
an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, | 
or wherein all touch by their summits. Though^ \, 
and feeling that break out there cannot be im-ii 
pounded by any fence of personality. This is the I 
key to the power of the greatest men, — their spiriti 
diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by ] 
night and by day, in concentric circles from its ori- 



USES OF GREAT MEN. 37 

gin, and publishes itself by unknown methods : the 
union of all minds appears intimate ; what gets ad- 
mission to one, cannot be kept out of any other ; the 
smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any 
quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of 
souls. If the disparities of talent and position van- 
ish when the individuals are seen in the duration 
which is necessary to complete the career of each, 
even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears 
when we ascend to the central identity of all the 
individuals, and know that they are made of the 
iBubstance which ordaineth and doeth. 

The genius of humanity is the right point of 
jview of history. The qualities abide; the men 
who exhibit them have now more, now less, and 
pass away ; the qualities remain on another brow. 
No experience is more familiar. Once you saw 
(phoenixes : they are gone ; the world is not there- 
|fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read 
'sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery ; 
but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you 
may still read them transferred to the walls of the 
)world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, 
as metres or milestones of progress. Once they 
were angels of knowledge and their figures touched 
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, 
culture and limits ; and they yielded their place 
to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain 



88 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

SO high that we have not been able to read them 
nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed 
them of a ray. But at last we shaU cease to look in 
men for completeness, and shall content ourselves 
with their social and delegated quality. AU that 
respects the individual is temporary and prospec- 
tive, like the individual himself, who is ascending 
out of his limits into a catholic existence. We 
have never come at the true and best benefit of any 
genius so long as we believe him an original force. 
In the moment when he ceases to help us as 
cause, he begins to help us more as an effect. Thei 
he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind an( 
will. The opaque self becomes transparent witl 
the light of the First Cause. 

Yet, within the limits of human education anc 
agency, we may say great men exist that there ma] 
be greater men. The destiny of organized natur^ 
is amelioration, and who can teU its limits ? It i^ 
for man to tame the chaos ; on every side, whilst 
he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of songJ 
that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder| 
and the germs of love and benefit may be multi| 
plied. 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 



11. 

PLATO; OK, THE PHILOSOPHER. 



Among secular books, Plato only is entitled to 
Omar's fanatical compliment to the Koran, when 
he said, " Burn the libraries ; for their value is in 
this book." These sentences contain the culture 
of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; 
these are the fountain-head of literatures. A dis- 
cipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, 
poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or prac- 
tical wisdom. There was never such range of spec- 
ulation. Out of Plato come aU things that are 
stiU written and debated among men of thought. 
Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We 
have reached the mountain from which all these 
drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the 
learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk 
young man who says in succession fine things to 
each reluctant generation, — Boethius, Rabelais, 
Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Cole- 
ridge, — is some reader of Plato, translating into 
the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the 



42 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

men of grander proportion suffer some deduction 
from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after 
this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Coper- 
nicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are 
likewise his debtors and must say after him. For 
it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all 
the particulars deducible from his thesis. 

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, — at 
once the glory and the shame of mankind, since 
neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any 
idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, 
and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his pos- 
terity and are tinged with his mind. How many 
great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of 
night, to be his men, — Platonists! the Alexandri- 
ans, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, 
not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John 
Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, 
Ralph Cud worth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor ; Mar- 
cilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is 
in liis Phaedo : Christianity is in it. Mahometan- 
ism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of 
morals, the Akhlak - y - Jalaly, from him. Mysti- 
cism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a 
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An 
Englishman reads and says, * how English ! ' a Ger- 
man, — ' how Teutonic I ' an Italian, — ' how Ro- 
man and how Greek I ' As they say that Helen 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 43 

of Argos had that universal beauty that every body 
felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader iii 
New England an American genius. His broad 
humanity transcends all sectional lines. 

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of 
the vexed question concerning his reputed works, 
— what are genuine, what spurious. It is singu- 
lar that wherever we find a man higher by a whole 
head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to 
come into doubt what are his real works. Thus 
Homer, Plato, Raiiaelle, Shakspeare. For these 
men magnetise their contemporaries, so that their 
companions can do for them what they can never do 
for themselves ; and the great man does thus live in 
several bodies, and write, or paint or act, by many 
hands ; and after some time it is not easy to say 
what is the authentic work of the master and what 
is only of his school. 

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his 
own times. What is a great man but one of great 
affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sci- 
ences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare 
nothing ; he can dispose of every thing. What is 
I not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence 
his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But 
the inventor only knows how to borrow; and so- 
ciety is glad to forget the innumerable laborers 
who ministered to this architect, and reserves all 



44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

its gratitude for him. When we are praising 
Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from 
Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every 
book is a quotation ; and every house is a quotation 
out of all forests and mines and stone quarries ; and 
every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. 
And this grasping inventor puts all nations under 
contribution. 

Plato absorbed the learning of his times, — Phi- 
lolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what 
else ; then his master, Socrates ; and finding him- 
self still capable of a larger synthesis, — beyond all 
example then or since, — he travelled into Italy, 
to gain what Pythagoras had for him ; then into 
Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the 
other element, which Europe wanted, into the Euro- 
pean mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as 
the representative of philosophy. He says, in the 
Sepublic, " Such a genius as philosophers must of 
necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts 
to meet in one man, but its different parts gener- 
ally spring up in different persons." Every man 
who would do anything well, must come to it from 
a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than 
a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of 
a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, 
and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of 
lyric expression), mainly is not a poet because he 
chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose. 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER 45' 

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. 
Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. 
They lived in their writings, and so their house 
and street life was trivial and commonplace. If 
you would know their tastes and complexions, the 
most admiring of their readers most resembles 
them. Plato especially has no external biography. 
If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing 
of them. He ground them all into paint. As a 
good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher 
converts the value of all his fortunes into his in- 
tellectual performances. 

He was born 427, A. C, about the time of the 
death of Pericles ; was of patrician connection in 
his times and city, and is said to have had an early 
inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, 
meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from 
this pursuit and remained for ten years his scholar, 
until the death of Socrates. He then went to 
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of 
Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went thither 
three times, though very capriciously treated. He 
travelled into Italy ; then into Egypt, where he 
stayed a long time ; some say three, — some say 
thirteen years. It is said he went farther, into 
Babylonia: this is uncertain. Eetuming to Athens, 
he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom hia 
fame drew thither ; and died, as we have received 
itj in the act of writing, at eighty-one years. 



46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

But the biography of Plato is interior. We 
are to account for the supreme elevation of this 
man in the intellectual history of our race, — how 
it happens that in proportion to the culture of 
men they become his scholars ; that, as our Jewish 
Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and 
household life of every man and woman in the 
European and American nations, so the writings of 
Plato have preoccupied every school of learning, 
every lover of thought, every church, every poet, 

— making it impossible to think, on certain levels, 
except through him. He stand^etween the tKith 
and every man's mind, andf^ms almost impressed 
language and the primary forms of thought with 
his name and' seal. I am struck, in reading him, 
with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. 
Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, 
in its long history of arts and arms ; here are all 
its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato, 

— and in none before him. It has spread itseK 
since into a hundred histories, but has added no 
new element. This perpetual modernness is the 
measure of merit in every work of art ; since the 
author of it was not misled by any thing short- 
lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. 
How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philoso- 
phy, and almost literature, is the problem for us t^s 
Bolve. 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 47 

This could not have happened without a sound, 
sincere and catholic man, able to honor, at the 
same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, 
or the order of nature. The first period of a na- 
tion, as of an individual, is the period of uncon- 
scious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp 
with fury, unable to express their desires. As 
soon as they can speak and tell their want and 
the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, 
whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men and women 
talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and 
quarrel : their manners are full of desperation ; 
their speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with cul- 
ture, things have cleared up a little, and they see 
them no longer in lumps and masses but accurately 
distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence 
and explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue 
had not been framed for articulation, man would 
still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness 
and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the 
education of ardent young men and women. ' Ah ! 
you don't understand me ; I have never met with 
any one who comprehends me : ' and they sigh and 
weep, write verses and walk alone, — fault of 
power to express their precise meaning. In a 
month or two, through the favor of their good gen- 
ius, they meet some one so related as to assist their 
volcanic estate, and, good communication being 



48 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

once established, they are thenceforward good citi- 
zens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accu- 
racy, to skill, to truth, from blind force. 

There is a moment in the history of every na- 
tion, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the 
perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have 
not yet become microscopic : so that man, at that 
instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with 
his feet still planted on the immense forces of 
night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar 
and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult 
health, the culmination of power. 

Such is the history of Europe, in all points ; and 
such in philosophy. Its early records, almost per- 
ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing 
with them the dreams of barbarians ; a confusion 
of crude notions of morals and of natural philos- 
ophy, gradually subsiding through the partial in- 
sight of single teachers. 

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, 
and we have the beginnings of geometry, meta- 
physics and ethics : then the partialists, — deduc- 
ing the origin of things from flux or water, or from 
air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with 
these causes mythologic pictures. At last comes 
Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric paint, 
or tattoo, or whooping ; for he can define. He 
leaves with Asia the vast and superlative ; he is 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER, 49 

the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. "He 
shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide 
and define." 

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the 
account which the human mind gives to itself of 
the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts 
lie forever at the base ; the one, and the two. — 
1. Unity, or Identity ; and, 2. Variety. We unite 
all things by perceiving the law which pervades 
them ; by perceiving the superficial differences and 
the profound resemblances. But every mental 
act, — this very perception of identity or oneness, 
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and 
otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think 
without embracing both. 

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many 
effects ; then for the cause of that ; and again the 
cause, diving still into the profound : self-assured 
that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient 
one, — a one that shall be all. " In the midst of 
the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is 
truth, and in the midst of truth is the imperishable 
being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East 
and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by 
an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the 
one to that which is not one, but other or many ; 
from cause to effect ; and affirms the necessary 
existence of variety, the self-existence of both, as 



4 



60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

each is involved in the other. These strictly- 
blended elements it is the problem of thought to 
separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mu- 
tually contradictory and exclusive ; and each so 
fast slides into the other that we can never say 
what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as 
nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; 
when we contemplate the one, the true, the good, — 
as in the surfaces and extremities of matter. 

In all nations there are minds which incline to 
dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. 
The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose 
all being in one Being. This tendency finds its 
highest expression in the religious writings of 
the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in 
the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu 
Purana. Those writings contain little else than 
this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains 
in celebrating it. 

The Same, the Same : friend and foe are of one 
stuff ; the ploughman, the plough and the furrow 
are of one stuff ; and the stuff is such and so much 
that the variations of form are unimportant. " You 
are fit " ( says the supreme Krishna to a sage ) " to 
apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That 
which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, 
with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men con- 
template distinctions, because they are stupefied 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 61 

with ignorance." " The words / and mine consti- 
tute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you 
shall now learn from me. It is soul, — one in all 
bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent 
over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay, 
omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, indepen- 
dent, unconnected with unrealities, with name, 
species and the rest, in time past, present and to 
come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is 
essentially one, is in one's own and in all other 
bodies, is the wisdom of one who laiows the unity 
of things. As one diffusive air, passing through 
the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the 
notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit 
is single, though its forms be manifold, arising 
from the consequences of acts. When the differ- 
ence of the investing form, as that of god or the 
rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction." " The 
whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who 
is identical with all things, and is to be regarded 
by the wise as not differing from, but as the same 
as themselves. I neither am going nor coming ; 
nor is my dwelling in any one place ; nor art thou, 
thou ; nor are others, others ; nor am I, I." As if 
he had said, ' All is for the soul, and the soul is 
Vishnu ; and animals and stars are transient paint- 
ings; and light is whitewash; and durations a^-e 
deceptive ; and form is imprisonment ; and heaven 



52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

itself a decoy.' That which the soul seeks is reso 
lution into being above form, out of Tartarus and 
out of heaven, — liberation from nature. 

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in 
which all things are absorbed, action tends directly 
backwards to diversity. The first is the course 
or gravitation of mind ; the second is the power 
of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity 
absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and 
creates. These two principles reappear and inter- 
penetrate all things, all thought; the one, the 
many. One is being ; the other,, intellect : one is 
necessity ; the other, freedom : one, rest ; the other, 
motion : one, power ; the other, distribution : one, 
strength ; the other, pleasure : one, consciousness ; 
the other, definition : one, genius ; the other, talent ; 
one, earnestness ; the other, knowledge : one, pos- 
session ; the other, trade : one, caste ; the other, 
culture : one, king ; the other, democracy : and, if 
we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, 
and name the last tendency of both, we might 
say, that the end of the one is escape from organ- 
ization, — pure science ; and the end of the other 
is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or 
executive deity. 

Each student adheres, by temperament and by 
habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of 
the mind. By religji)n, he tends to unity ; by in- 



PLATO; on, THE PHILOSOPHER. 63 

tellcct, or by the senses, to the many. A too 
rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to 
parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of spec- 
ulation. 

To this partiality the history of nations corre- 
sponded. The country of unity, of immovable insti- 
tutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in ab- 
stractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in prac- 
tice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense 
fate, is Asia ; and it realizes this faith in the social 
institution of caste. On the other side, the genius 
of Europe is active and creative : it resists caste by 
culture ; its philosophy was a discipline ; it is a 
land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the 
East loved infinity, the West delighted in bounda- 
ries. 

European civility is the triumph of talent, the 
extension of system, the sharpened understanding, 
adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifes- 
tation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, 
(jreece, had been working in this element with the 
joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of 
the detriment of an excess. They saw before them 
no sinister political economy ; no ominous Maltlms ; 
no Paris or London ; no pitiless subdivision of 
classes, — the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of 
the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, 
of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian 



54 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to 
throw it off. The understanding was in its health 
and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. 
They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, 
and their perfect works in architecture and sculp- 
ture seemed things of course, not more difficult 
than the completion of a new ship at the Medford 
yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are 
in course, and may be taken for granted. The Ro- 
man legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, 
the saloons of Versailles, the caf^s of Paris, the 
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen 
in perspective; the town-meeting, the ballot-box, 
the newspaper and cheap press. 

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pil- 
grimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which 
all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and 
the detail of Europe ; the infinitude of the Asiatic 
soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-mak- 
ing, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe, — Plato 
came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the en- 
ergy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia 
are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philos- 
ophy expressed the genius of Europe ; he substructs 
the religion of Asia, as the base. 

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of 
the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to 
be small. The reason why we do not at once be. 



PLATO,' OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 65 

lieve in admirable souls is because they are not in 
our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as 
to be incredible ; but primarily there is not ojily no 
presumption against them, but the strongest pre- 
sumption in favor of their appearance. But 
whether voices were heard in the sky, or not ; 
whether his mother or his father dreamed that the 
infant man-child was the son of Apollo ; whether 
a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not ; — a 
man who could see two sides of a thing was born. 
The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature ; the 
upper and the under side of the raedal of Jove 
the union of impossibilities, which reappears in 
every object ; its real and its ideal power, — - was 
now also transferred entire to the consciousness of 
a man. 

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract 
truth, he saved himself by propounding the most 
popular of all principles, the absolute good, which 
rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made 
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by 
drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained 
by orators and polite conversers ; from mares and 
puppies ; from pitchers and soup-ladles ; from cooks 
and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, 
butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in 
himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two 
poles of thought slaall appear in his statement. 



56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

His argument and his sentence are self-poised and 
spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and be- 
come two hands, to grasp and ajDpropriate their 
own. 

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. 
Our strength is transitional, alternating ; or, shall 
1 say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea 
seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of 
two metals in contact ; and our enlarged powers at 
the approach and at the departure of a friend ; the 
experience of poetic creativeness, which is not 
found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling,^ but 
in transitions from one to the other, which must 
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much 
transitional surface as possible ; this command of 
two elements must explain the power and the 
charm of Plato. Art expresses the one or the 
same by the different. Thought seeks to know 
unity in unity ; poetry to show it by variety ; that 
is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the 
two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his 
side, and invariably uses both. Things added to 
things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. 
Things used as language are inexhaustibly attrac- 
tive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the 
reverse of the medal of Jove. 

To take an example : — The physical philoso- 
phers had sketched each his theory of the world; 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER, 57 

the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit ; the- 
ories mechanical and chemical in their genius. 
Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all nat- 
ural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, 
to be no theories of the world but bare inventories 
and lists. To the study of nature he therefore 
prefixes the dogma, — " Let us declare the cause 
which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and 
compose the universe. He was good ; and he who 
is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, 
he wished that all things should be as much as 
possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise 
men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the 
origin and foundation of the world, will be in the 
truth." " All things are for the sake of the good, 
and it is the cause of every thing beautiful." This 
dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy. 

The synthesis which makes the character of his 
mind appears in all his talents. Where there is 
great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies 
that combine easily in the living man, but in de- 
scription appear incompatible. The mind of Plato 
is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but 
is to be apprehended by an original mind in the 
exercise of its original power. In him the freest 
abandonment is united with the precision of a 
geometer. His daring imagination gives him the 
more solid grasp of facts ; as the birds of highest 



58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician 
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony 
so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the 
soundest health and strength of frame. According 
to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to 
the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato." 

With this palatial air there is, for the direct 
aim of several of his works and running through 
the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which 
mounts, in the Eepublic and in the Phgedo, to 
piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness 
at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anec- 
dotes that have come down from the times attest 
his manly interference before the people in his 
master's behalf, since even the savage cry of the 
assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indigna- 
tion towards popular government, in many of his 
pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has 
a probit}^, a native reverence for justice and honor, 
and a humanity which makes him tender for the 
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he be- 
lieves that poetry, prophecy and the high insight 
are from a wisdom of which man is not master ; 
that the gods never philosopliize, but by a celestial 
mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed 
on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, 
visits worlds which flesh cannot enter ; he saw the 
souls in pain, he hears the doom of the judge, he 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 69 

beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with 
the rock and shears, and hears the intoxicating 
hum of their spindle. 

But his circumspection never forsook him. One 
would say he had read the inscription on the gates 
of Busyrane, — " Be bold ; " and on the second 
gate, — " Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold ; " 
and then again had paused well at the third gate, 
— " Be not too bold." His strength is like the 
momentum of a falling planet, and his discretion 
the return of its due and perfect curve, — so excel- 
lent is his Greek love of boundary and his skill 
in definition. In reading logarithms one is not 
more secure than in following Plato in his flights. 
Nothing can be colder than his head, when the 
liglitnings of his imagination are playing in the 
sky. He has finished his thinking before he 
brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the sur- 
prises of a literary master. He has that opulence 
which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon 
he needs. As the rich man wears no more gar- 
ments, drives no more horses, sits in no more 
chambers than the poor, — but has that one dress, 
or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the 
hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never 
restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed 
no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did 
not possess and use, — epic, analysis, mania, intui- 



60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

tion, music, satire and irony, down to the custom- 
ary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his 
jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric 
art is good philosophy ; and his finding that word 
" cookery," and " adulatory art," for rhetoric, in 
the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. 
No orator can measure in effect with him who can 
give good nicknames. 

What moderation and imderstatement and check- 
ing his thunder in mid volley ! He has good-na- 
turedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all 
that can be said against the schools. " For philos- 
ophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly med- 
dles with it ; but if he is conversant with it more 
than is becoming, it corrupts the man." He could 
well afford to be generous, — he, who from the 
sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a 
faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was 
his speech : he plays with the doubt and makes the 
most of it : he paints and quibbles ; and by and by 
comes a sentence that moves the sea and land. 
The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, 
in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in 
bursts of light. "I, therefore, Callicles, am per- 
suaded by these accounts, and consider how I may 
exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy con- 
dition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that 
most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 61 

endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can ; 
and when I die, to die so. And I invite all other 
men, to the utmost of my power ; and you too I 
in turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, 
surpasses all contests here." 

He is a great average man ; one who, to the best 
thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his fac- 
ulties, so that men see in him their own dreams and 
glimpses made available and made to pass for what 
they are. A great common-sense is his warrant 
and qualification to be the world's interpreter. He 
has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class 
have : but he has also what they have not, — this 
strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the 
appearances of the world, and build a bridge from 
the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never 
this graduation, but slopes his thought, however 
picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access 
from the plain. He never writes in ecstacy, or 
catches us up into poetic raptures. 

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could 
prostrate himself on the earth and cover his eyes 
whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, 
or gauged, or known, or named: that of which 
every thing can be affirmed and denied: that 
"which is entity and nonentity." He called it 
Buper-essential. He even stood ready, as in the 



62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so, — tliat 
tliis Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No 
man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. 
Having paid his homage, as for the human race, 
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the 
human race affirmed, 'And yet things are know- 
able ! ' — that is, the Asia in his mind was first 
heartily honored, — the ocean of love and power, 
before form, before will, before knowledge, the 
Same, the Good, the One ; and now, refreshed and 
empowered by this worship, the instinct of Eu- 
rope, namely, culture, returns ; and he cries, ' Yet 
things are knowable ! ' They are knowable, be- 
cause being from one, things correspond. There 
is a scale; and the correspondence of heaven to 
earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, 
is our guide. As there is a science of stars, 
called astronomy; a science of quantities, called 
mathematics; a science of qualities, called chem- 
istry; so there is a science of sciences, — I call 
it Dialectic, — which is the Intellect discriminat- 
ing the false and the true. It rests on the obser- 
vation of identity and diversity; for to judge is 
to unite to an object the notion which belongs to 
it. The sciences, even the best, — mathematics and 
astronomy, — are like sportsmen, who seize what- 
ever prey offers, even without being able to make 
any use of it. Dialectic must teach the use of 



PLATO', OB, THE PHILOSOPHER. 63 

them. " This is of that rank that no intellectual 
man will enter on any study for its own sake, but 
only with a view to advance himseK in that one 
sole science which embraces all." 

" The essence or peculiarity of man is to com- 
prehend a whole; or that which in the diversity 
of sensations can be comprised under a rational 
unity." "The soul which has never perceived 
the truth, cannot pass into the human form." I 
announce to men the Intellect. I announce the 
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that 
made nature : this benefit, namely, that it can 
understand nature, which it made and maketh. 
Nature is good, but intellect is better : as the law- 
giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, 
O sons of men ! that truth is altogether whole- 
some; that we have hope to search out what 
might be the very self of everything. The mis- 
ery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence 
and to be stuffed with conjectures ; but the su- 
preme good is reality ; the supreme l)eauty is 
reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on 
this science of the real : for courage is nothing 
else than knowledge ; the fairest fortune that can 
befall man is to be guided by his daemon to that 
which is truly his own. This also is the essence 
of justice, — to attend every one his own : nay, 
the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at excejPt 



64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

through direct contemplation of the divine essence. 
Courage then ! for " the persuasion that we must 
search that which we do not know, will render 
us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more 
industrious than if we thought it impossible to 
discover what we do not know, and useless to 
search for it." He secures a position not to be 
commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing 
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing 
with real being. 

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Cul- 
ture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and recog- 
nized, more genially one would say than any since, 
the hope of education. He delighted in every ac- 
complishment, in every graceful and useful and 
truthful performance ; above all in the splendors 
of genius and intellectual achievement. " The 
whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, " is, with 
the wise, the measure of hearing such discourses as 
these." What a price he sets on the feats of tal- 
ent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Par- 
menides ! What price above price on the talents 
themselves ! He called the several faculties, gods, 
in his beautiful personation. What value he gives 
to the art of gymnastic in education ; what to ge- 
ometry ; what to music ; what to astronomy, whose 
appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates ! In 
the Timaeus he indicates the highest employment 



PLATO; OR, THE PIITLOSOPIIER. 65 

of the eyes. " By us it is asserted that God in- 
vented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose, 
— that on surveying the circles of intelligence in 
the heavens, we might properly employ those of our 
own minds, which, though disturbed when com- 
pared with the others that are uniform, are still 
allied to their circulations; and that having thus 
learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct 
reasoning faculty, we might, by imitating the uni- 
form revolutions of divinity, set right our own wan- 
derings and blunders." And in the Republic, — 
" By each of these disciplines a certain organ of 
the soul is both purified and reanimated which is 
blinded and buried by studies of another kind ; an 
organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, 
since truth is perceived by this alone." 

He said. Culture ; but he first admitted its basis, 
and gave immeasurably the first place to advan- 
tages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on 
the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the 
organic character and disposition is the origin of 
caste. " Such as were fit to govern, into their com- 
position the informing Deity mingled gold ; into 
the military, silver ; iron and brass for husbandmen 
and artificers." The East confirms itself, in all 
ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this 
point of caste. " Men have their metal, as of gold 
and silver. Those of you who were the worthy 

VOL. IV. 5 



6Q REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ones in the state of ignorance, will be tlie worthy 
ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace 
it." Plato was not less firm. " Of the five orders 
of things, only four can be taught to the generality 
of men." In the Republic he insists on the tem- 
peraments of the youth, as first of the first. 

A happier example of the stress laid on nature 
is in the dialogue with the young Theages, who 
wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates 
declares that if some have grown wise by asso- 
ciating with him, no thanks are due to him ; but, 
simply, wliilst they were with him they grew wise, 
not because of him ; he pretends not to know the 
way of it. " It is adverse to many, nor can those 
be benefited by associating with me whom the Dae- 
mon opposes ; so that it is not possible for me to 
live with these. With many however he does not 
prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all 
benefited by associating with me. Such, O The- 
ages, is the association with me ; for, if it pleases 
the God, you will make great and rapid profi- 
ciency : you will not, if he does not please. Judge 
whether it is not safer to be instructed by some 
one of those who have power over the benefit which 
they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, 
just as it may happen." As if he had said, 'I have 
no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You 
will be what you must. If there is love between 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 67 

us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our 
intercourse be ; if not, your time is lost and you 
will only annoy me. I sliall seem to you stupid, 
and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, 
beyond the will of you or me, is this secret affinity 
or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and 
I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my 
business.' 

He said, Culture; he said. Nature; and he failed 
not to add, ' There is also the divine.' There is 
no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to 
convert itself into a power and organizes a huge 
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, 
loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and no- 
bility which come from truth itself and good itself, 
and attempted as if on the part of the human in- 
tellect, once for all to do it adequate homage, — 
homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet 
homage becoming the intellect to render. He said 
then ' Our faculties run out into infinity, and re- 
turn to us thence. We can define but a little way ; 
but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and 
which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things 
are in a scale ; and, begin where we will, ascend 
and ascend. All things are symbolical ; and what 
we call results are beginnings.' 

A key to the method and completeness of Plato 
is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated 



68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

the relation between the absolute good and true 
and the forms of the intelligible world, he says : — 
" Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. 
Cut again each of these two main parts, — one 
representing the visible, the other the intelligible 
world, — and let these two new sections represent 
the bright part and the dark part of each of these 
worlds. You v/ill have, for one of the sections of 
the visible world, images, that is, both shadows and 
reflections ; — for the other section, the objects of 
these images, that is, plants, animals, and the works 
of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible 
world in like manner; the one section will be of 
opinions and hypotheses, and the other section of 
truths." To these four sections, the four opera- 
tions of the soul correspond, — conjecture, faith, 
understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the 
image of the sun, so every thought and thing re- 
stores us an image and creature of the supreme 
Good. The universe is perforated by a million 
channels for his activity. All things mount and 
mount. 

All his thought has this ascension ; in Phaedrus, 
teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all 
things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and 
confidence through the universe v/herever it en- 
ters, and it enters in some degree into all things: 
^=but that there is another, which is as much 



PLATO; OR, THE PIIILOSOPIIER. 69 

more beautiful than beauty as beauty is than 
chaos ; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ 
of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be 
seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality. He 
has the same regard to it as the source of excel- 
lence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, 
in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which 
always subsists according to the same; and, em- 
ploying a model of this kind, expresses its idea and 
power in his work, — it must follow that his pro- 
duction should be beautiful. But when he beholds 
that which is born and dies, it will be far from 
beautiful. 

Thus ever : the Banquet is a teaching in the 
same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry and to 
all the sermons of the world, that the love of the 
sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the 
passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty 
it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is 
never out of mind, and constitutes the ground of 
all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom ; — 
God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms 
that virtue cannot be taught ; that it is not a sci- 
ence, but an inspiration •, that the greatest goods 
are produced to us through mania and are as- 
signed to us by a divine gift. 

This leads me to that central figure which he 
has established in Ms Academy as the organ 



70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

through which every considered opinion shall be 
announced, and whose biography he has likewise so 
labored that the historic facts are lost in the light 
of Plato's mind. Socrates and Plato are the dou- 
ble star which the most powerful instruments will 
not entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits 
and genius, is the best example of that synthesis 
which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power. 
Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest 
enough ; of the commonest history ; of a personal 
homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit 
in others : — the rather that his broad good nature 
and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, 
which was sure to be paid. The players person- 
ated him on the stage ; the potters copied his ugly 
face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, 
adding to his humor a perfect temper and a knowl- 
edge of his man, be he who he might whom he 
talked with, which laid the companion open to cer- 
tain defeat in any debate, — and in debate he im- 
moderately delighted. The young men are prodig- 
iously fond of him and invite him to their feasts, 
whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, 
too ; has the strongest head in Athens ; and after 
leaving the whole party under the table, goes away 
as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues 
with somebody that is sober. In short, he was 
what our country-people call an old one. 



PLATO; OR, THE PIIILOSOPIIER 71 

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was 
monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never 
willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old 
characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought 
every thing in Athens a little better than anything 
in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in 
habit and speech, affected low phrases, and illustra- 
tions from cocks and quails, soup-pans and syca- 
more-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnameable 
offices, — especially if he talked with any superfine 
person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus 
he shov/ed one who was afraid to go on foot to 
Olympia, that it was no more than his daily walk 
within doors, if continuously extended, would easily 
reach. 

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, 
an immense talker, — the rumor ran that on one 
or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had 
shown a determination which had covered the re- 
treat of a troop ; and there was some story that 
under cover of folly, he had, in the city govern- 
ment, when one day he chanced to hold a seat 
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the 
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. 
He is very poor ; but then he is hardy as a soldier, 
and can live on a few olives ; usually, in the strict- 
est sense, on bread and water, except when enter- 
tained by liis friends. His necessary expenses 



T2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he 
did. He wore no under garment ; his upper gar- 
ment was the same for summer and winter, and he 
went barefooted ; and it is said that to procure the 
pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all 
day with the most elegant and cultivated young 
men, he will now and then return to his shop and 
carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that 
be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in 
jtiothing else than this conversation ; and that, un- 
der his hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, 
he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, 
all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives 
or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands. 
Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so hon- 
est and really curious to know ; a man who was 
willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, 
and who willingly confuted others asserting what 
was false ; and not less pleased when confuted than 
when confuting ; for he thought not any evil hap- 
pened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion 
respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless dis- 
putant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of 
whose conquering intelligence no man had ever 
reached ; whose temper was imperturbable ; whose 
dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive ; 
so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest 
and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 73 

horrible doubts and confusion. But he always 
knew the way out ; knew it, yet would not tell it. 
No escape ; he drives them to terrible choices 
by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and 
Gorgiases with their grand reputations, as a boy 
tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist ! — Meno 
has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on vir- 
tue, before many companies, and very well, as it ap- 
peared to him ; but at this moment he cannot even 
tell what it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has 
so bewitched him. 

- This hard-headed humorist, whose strange con- 
ceits, drollery and honhommie diverted the young 
patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and 
quibbles gets abroad every day, — turns out, in the 
sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, 
and to be either insane, or at least, under cover 
of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When 
accused before the judges of subverting the popu- 
lar creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, 
the future reward and punishment ; and refusing 
to recant, in a caprice of the popular government 
was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. 
Socrates entered the prison and took away all 
ignominy from the place, which could not be a 
prison whilst he was there. Crito bribed the 
jailer ; but Socrates would not go out by treach- 
ery. " Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is 



74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

to be preferred before justice. These things 1 
hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes me 
deaf to every thing you say." The fame of this 
prison, the fame of the discourses there and the 
drinking of the hemlock are one of the most prec- 
ious passages in the history of the world. 

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the 
droll and the martyr, the keen street and market 
debater with the sweetest saint known to any his- 
tory at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of 
Plato, so capacious of these contrasts ; and the fig- 
ure of Socrates by a necessity placed itself in the 
foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of 
the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. 
It was a rare fortune that this .^sop of the mob 
and this robed scholar should meet, to make each 
other immortal in their mutual faculty. The 
strange synthesis in the character of Socrates 
capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato. More- 
over by this means he was able, in the direct way 
and without envy to avail himself of the wit and 
weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his 
own debt was great ; and these derived again their 
principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato. 

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in 
power is only that which results inevitably from 
his quality. He is intellectual in his aim ; and 
therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into 



PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 75 

heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws 
of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of 
crime, the hope of the parting soul, — he is liter- 
ary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole de- 
duction from the merit of Plato that his writings 
have not, — what is no doubt incident to this reg- 
nancy of intellect in his work, — the vital author- 
ity which the screams of prophets and the sermons 
of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is 
an interval ; and to cohesion, contact is necessary. 

I know not what can be said in reply to this 
criticism but that we have come to a fact in the 
nature of things : an oak is not an orange. The 
qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of 
salt with salt. 

In the second place, he has not a system. The 
dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He 
attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory 
is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks 
he means this, and another that ; he has said one 
thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another 
place. He is charged with having failed to make 
the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the 
world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest 
piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a 
mark of haste, or botching, or second thought ; but 
the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and 
patches. 

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. 



76 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known 
and accurate expression for tlie world, and it should 
be accurate. It shall be the world passed through 
the mind of Plato, — nothing less. Every atom 
shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every 
relation or quality you knew before, you shall know 
again and find here, but now ordered ; not nature, 
but art. And you shall feel that Alexander in- 
deed overran, with men and horses, some countries 
of the planet ; but countries, and things of which 
countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws 
of planet and of men, have passed through this 
man as bread into his body, and become no longer 
bread, but body : so all this mammoth morsel has 
become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the 
world. This is the ambition of individualism. But 
the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor 
has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls 
abroad in the attempt ; and biting, gets strangled : 
the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own 
teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature 
lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all : so 
must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal na- 
ture, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercita- 
tions. He argues on this side and on that. The 
acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never 
tell what Platonism was ; indeed, admirable texts 
can be quoted on both sides of every great ques» 
tion from him. 



PLATO i OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 77 

These things we are forced to say if we must 
consider the effort of Plato or of any philosopher 
to dispose of nature, — which will not be disposed 
of. No power of genius has ever yet had the 
smallest success in explaining existence. The per- 
fect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in 
assuming tliis ambition for Plato. Let us not 
seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. 
Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted 
his transcendent claims. The way to know him is 
to compare him^ not with nature, but with other 
men. How many ages have gone by, and he re- 
mains unapproached ! A chief structure of human 
wit, lilic Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or 
the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breath of 
human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest 
seen when seen with the most respect. His sense 
deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When 
wc say. Here is a fine collection of fables ; or when 
we praise the style, or the common sense, or arith- 
metic, we speak as boys, and much of our im- 
patient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no 
better. 

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, 
when we are in a hurry ; but it is still best that 
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty 
yards. The great ■ eyed Plato proportioned the 
lights and shades after the genius of our life. 



PLATO: NEW READINGS. 



The publication, in Mr. Bolin's " Serial Librae 
ry," of the excellent translations of Plato, which 
we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press 
has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a 
few more notes of the elevation and bearings of 
this fixed star ; or to add a bulletin, like the jour- 
nals, of Plato at the latest dates. 

Modern science, by the extent of its generaliza- 
tion, has learned to indemnify the student of man 
for the defects of individuals by tracing growth 
and ascent in races ; and, by the simple expedient 
of lighting up the vast background, generates a 
feeling of complacency and hope. The human 
being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. 
His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, 
look glorious when prospectively beheld from the 
distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems 
as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind 
her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned 
Dut five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and 



PLATO; NEW READINGS. 79 

Columbus, was no wise discontented with the re- 
sult. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. 
These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and 
saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. 
With this artist, time and space are cheap, and she 
is insensible to what you say of tedious prepara- 
tion. She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of 
paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man 
should arrive. Then periods must pass before the 
motion of the earth can be suspected ; then before 
the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers 
can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession 
of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato 
has the fortune in the history of mankind to mark 
an epoch. 

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or 
on any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or 
on any thesis, as for example the immortality of 
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school- 
man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar 
message. He represents the privilege of the in- 
tellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every 
fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in 
every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions 
are in the essence of thought. The naturalist 
would never help us to them by any discoveries 
of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when 
cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as when 



80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

measuring the angles of an acre. But the Repub- 
lic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to 
require and so to anticipate the astronomy of 
Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind 
does not create what it perceives, any more than 
the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the 
merit of announcing them, we only say. Here was 
a more complete man, who could apply to nature 
the whole scale of the senses, the understanding 
and the reason. These expansions or extensions 
consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the 
horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this 
second sight discovering the long lines of law 
which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he 
stands on a path which has no end, but runs con- 
tinuously round the universe. Therefore every 
word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever 
he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior 
senses. His perception of the generation of con- 
traries, of death out of life and life out of death, — 
that law by which, in nature, decomposition is re- 
composition, and putrefaction and cholera are only 
signals of a new creation ; his discernment of the 
little in the large and the large in the small; 
studying the state in the citizen and the citizen 
in the state ; and leaving it doubtful whether he 
exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the edu- 
cation of the private soul ; his beautiful definitions 



PLATO; NEW READINGS. 81 

of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, 
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of 
virtue, courage, justice, temperance ; his love of 
the apologue, and his apologues themselves ; the 
cave of Trophonius ; the ring of Gyges ; the char- 
ioteer and two horses ; the golden, silver, brass and 
iron temperaments ; Theuth and Thamus ; and the 
visions of Hades and the Fates, — fables which 
have imprinted themselves in the human memory 
like the signs of the zodiac ; his soliform eye and 
his bonif orm soul ; his doctrine of assimilation ; his 
doctrine of reminiscence ; his clear vision of the 
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant 
justice throughout the universe, instanced every- 
where, but specially in the doctrine, " what comes 
from God to us, returns from us to God," and in 
Socrates' belief that the laws below are sisters of 
the laws above. 

More striking examples are his moral conclu- 
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science 
and virtue ; for vice can never know itself and 
virtue, but virtue knows both itself and vice. 
The eye attested that justice was best, as long as 
it was profitable ; Plato affirms that it is profitable 
throughout ; that the profit is intrinsic, though the 
just conceal his justice from gods and men ; that 
it is better to suffer injustice than to do it ; that 
the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the 

VOL. IV. 6 



82 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that 
ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calami- 
tous than involuntary homicide ; that the soul is 
unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no 
man sins willingly ; that the order or proceeding 
of nature was from the mind to the body, and, 
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound 
mind, yet a good soid can, by its virtue, render the 
body the best possible. The intelligent have a 
right over the ignorant, namely, the right of in- 
structing them. The right punishment of one out 
of tune is to make him play in tune ; the fine 
which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, 
is, to be governed by a worse man ; that his guards 
shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be in- 
structed that there is gold and silver in their souls, 
which will make men willing to give them every 
thing which they need. 

This second sight explains the stress laid on 
geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was 
not more lawful and precise than- was the super- 
sensible; tliat a celestial geometry was in place 
there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; 
that the world was throughout mathematical ; the 
proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and lime; 
there is just so much water and slate and magnesia; 
not less are the proportions constant of the moraJ 
elements. 



PLATO; NEW READINGS. 83 

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false- 
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the base 
of the accidental ; in discovering connection, con- 
tinuity and representation everywhere, hating insu- 
lation ; and appears like the god of wealth among 
the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capa- 
bility in everything he touches. Ethical science 
was new and vacant when Plato could write thus : 
— " Of all whose arguments are left to the men 
of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned 
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as re- 
spects the repute, honors and emoluments arising 
therefrom ; while, as respects either of them in it- 
self, and subsisting by its own power in the soul 
of the possessor, and concealed both from gods 
and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated, 
either in poetry or prose writings, — how, namely, 
that injustice is the greatest of all the evils that 
the soul has within it, and justice the greatest 
good." 

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, 
permanent, uniform and self-existent, forever dis- 
criminating them from the notions of the under- 
standing, marks an era in the world. He was 
born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, 
endless, generator of new ends ; a power which is 
the key at once to the centrality and the eva- 
^escence of thin/^s. Plato is so centred that he 



84 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of 
knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of 
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he 
offers as the most probable particular explication. 
Call that fanciful, — it matters not: the connec-' 
tion between our knowledge and the abyss of 
being is still real, iand the explication must be 
not less magnificent. 

He has indicated every eminent point in spec- 
ulation. He wi'ote on the scale of the mind 
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his 
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, 
and descended into detail with a courage like 
that he witnessed in nature. One would say 
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm 
or a district or an island, in intellectual geog- 
raphy, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He 
domesticates the soul in nature : man is the micro- 
cosm. All the circles of the visible heaven repre- 
sent as many circles in the rational soid. There 
is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual 
in the action of the human mind. The names of 
things, too, are fatal, following the nature of 
things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by 
their names, significant of a profound sense. The 
gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifesta- 
tion; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal 
Boul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; 



PLATO; NEW READINGS. 85 

Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellec- 
tual illustration. 



These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had ap- 
peared often to pious and to poetic souls ; but this 
well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with 
command, gathers them all up into rank and gra- 
dation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the 
two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the 
intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He 
describes his own ideal, when he paints, in Ti- 
maeus, a god leading things from disorder into 
order. He kindled a fire so truly in the centre 
that we see the sphere illuminated, and can dis- 
tinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, 
every arc and node : a theory so averaged, so 
modulated, that you would say the winds of ages 
had swept through this rhythmic structure, and 
not that it was the brief extempore blotting of 
one short-lived scribe. Hence it Las happened 
that a very well-marked class of souls, namely 
those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an 
ethico-intellectual expression to every truth, by 
exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate 
to it, — are said to Platonize. Thus, Michael An- 
gelo is a Platonist in his sonnets : Shakspeare is 
a Platonist when he writes,— 



86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

" Nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean," 

or,— 

" He, that can endure 

To follow with allegiance a fallen lord. 

Does conquer him that did his master conquer, 

And earns a place in the story." 

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude 
only of Shakspeare's proper genius that hinders 
him from being classed as the most eminent of 
this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose 
poem of " Conjugal Love," is a Platonist. 

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. 
The secret of his popular success is the moral aim 
which endeared him to mankind. " Intellect," he 
said, " is king of heaven and of earth ; " but in 
Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings 
have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For 
their arguments, most of them, might have been 
couched in sonnets : and poetry has never soared 
higher than in the Timseus and the Phsedrus. As 
the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did 
not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an insti- 
tution. All his painting in the Republic must be 
esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, some- 
times in violent colors, his thought. You cannot 
institute, without peril of charlatanism. 

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege 
for the best (which, to make emphatic, he ex' 



PLATO; NEW READINGS, 87 

pressed by community of women), as the premium 
which he would set on grandeur. There shall 
be exempts of two kinds : first, those who by de- 
merit have put themselves below protection, — 
outlaws ; and secondly, those who by eminence of 
nature and desert are out of the reach of your 
rewards. Let such be free of the city and above 
the law. We confide them to themselves; let 
them do with us as they will. Let none presume 
to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo 
and Socrates by village scales. 

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a 
little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry 
to see him, after such noble superiorities, permit- 
ting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence 
a little with the baser sort, as people allow them- 
selves with their dogs and cats. 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 



ni. 

SWEDENBOEG; OK, THE MYSTIC. 



Among eminent persons, those who are most 
dear to men are not of the class which the econo- 
mist calls producers : they have nothing in their 
hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made 
bread ; they have not led out a colony, nor invented 
a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and 
love of this city-building market-going race of man- 
kind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual 
kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with 
ideas and pictures which raise men out of the 
world of corn and money, and console them for the 
short-comings of the day and the meanness of labor 
and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher has his 
value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer by 
engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in 
new faculties. Others may build cities ; he is to 
understand them and keep them in awe. Bat there 
is a class who lead us into another region, — the 
world of morals or of will. What is singular about 
this region of thought is its claim. Wherever the 



92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of 
every thing else. For other things, I make poetry 
of them ; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of 
me. 

I have sometimes thought that he would render 
the greatest service to modern criticism, who 
should draw the line of relation that subsists be- 
tween Shakspeare and Swedenborg. The human 
mind standi ever in perplexity, demanding intel- 
lect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each 
without the other. The reconciler has not yet ap- 
peared. If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is 
our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently 
teach that the problem of essence must take pre- 
cedence of all others ; — the questions of Whence ? 
What? and Whither? and the solution of these 
must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or 
poem is a proximate or oblique reply ; but Moses, 
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The 
atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grand- 
eur which reduces all material magnificence to 
toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the 
doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste 
it lays its empire on the man. In the language 
of the Koran, " God said, the heaven and the 
earth and all that is between them, think ye that 
we created them in jest, and that ye shall not re- 
turn to us ? " It is the kingdom of the will, and 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 93 

by inspiring tlie will, which is the seat of personal* 
ity, seems to convert the universe into a per- 
son ; — 

" The realms of being to no other bow, 
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou." 

All men are commanded by the saint. The 
Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by 
nature good, and whose goodness has an influence 
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim 
of creation : the other classes are admitted to the 
feast of being, only as following in the train of 
this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of 
this kind, — 

" Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet; 
Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with tliee." 

The privilege of this caste is an access to the 
secrets and structure of nature by some higher 
method than by experience. In common parlance, 
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man 
of extraordinary sagacity is said, without expe- 
rience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul 
Khain, the mystic, and Abu AH Seena, the philos- 
opher, conferred together ; and, on parting, the 
philosopher said, " All that he sees, I know ; " and 
the mystic said, " All that he knows, I see." If 
one should ask the reason of this intuition, the 
solution would lead us into that property which 



94 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is im- 
pHed by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigra- 
tion. The soul having been often born, or, as the 
Hindoos say, " travelling the path of existence 
through thousands of births," having beheld the 
things which are here, those which are in heaven 
and those which are beneath, there is nothing of 
which she has not gained the knowledge : no won- 
der that she is able to recollect, in regard to any 
one thing, what formerly she knew. "For, all 
things in nature being linked and related, and the 
soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders 
but that any man who has recalled to mind, or ac- 
cording to the common phrase has learned, one 
thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient 
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he 
have but courage and faint not in the midst of his 
researches. For inquiry and learning is reminis- 
cence all." How much more, if he that inquires 
be a holy and godlike soul ! For by being as- 
similated to the original soul, by whom and after 
whom all things subsist, the soul of man does then 
easily flow into all things, and all things flow into 
it : they mix ; and he is present and sympathetic 
with their structure and law. 

This path is difficult, secret and beset with ter- 
ror. The ancients called it ecstacy or absence, — ■ 
a getting out of their bodies to think. All relig 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 95 

ious history contains traces of the trance of saints, 
— a beatitude, but without any sign of joy ; ear- 
nest, solitary, even sad ; " the flight," Plotinus 
called it, " of the alone to the alone ; " Muv^ais, the 
closing of the eyes, — whence our word, Mystic, 
The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Beh- 
men, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, 
will readily come to mind. But what as readily 
comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. 
This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to 
the mind of the receiver. 

** It o'erinf orms the tenement of clay," 

and drives the man mad ; or gives a certain vio- 
lent bias which taints his judgment. In the chief 
examples of religious illumination somewhat mor- 
bid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable in- 
crease of mental power. Must the highest good 
drag after it a quality which neutralizes and dis- 
credits it ? — 

" Indeed, it takes 
From our achievements, when performed at height, 
The pith and marrow of our attribute." 

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses 
so much earth and so much fire, by weight and 
meter, to make a man, and will not add a penny- 
weight though a nation is perishing for a leader ? 
Therefore the men of God purchased their science 



96 • REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, 
carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transpar- 
ent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the 
grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter's 
earth, clay, or mud. 

In modern times no such remarkable example of 
this introverted mind has occurred as in Emanuel 
Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This 
man, who appeared to his contemporaries a vision- 
ary and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most 
real life of any man then in the world : and now, 
when the royal and ducal Frederics, Christians and 
Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he 
begins to spread himself into the minds of thoiv 
sands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by 
the variety and amount of his powers, to be a com- 
position of several persons, — like the giant fruits 
which are matured in gardens by the union of four 
or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger 
scale and possesses the advantages of size. As it 
is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere 
in large globes, though defaced by some crack or 
blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large 
calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, 
like Pascal or Newton, help us more than balaiiced 
mediocre minds. 

His youth and training could not fail to be ex- 
traordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC, 97 

dance, but goes grubbing into mines and moun- 
tains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, 
mathematics and astronomy, to find images fit for 
the measure of his versatile and capacious brain. 
He was a scholar from a child, and was educated 
at Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight he was 
made Assessor of the Board of Mines by Charles 
XII. In 1716, he left home for four years and 
visited the universities of England, Holland, 
France and Germany. He performed a notable 
feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of Fred- 
erikshald, by hauling two gaUeys, five boats and a 
sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, for 
the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Eu- 
rope to examine mines and smelting works. He 
published in 1716 his Dsedalus Hjrperboreus, and 
from this time for the next thirty years was em- 
ployed in the composition and publication of his 
scientific works. With the like force he threw 
himself into theology. In 1743, when he was fifty- 
four years old, what is called his illumination be- 
gan. All his metallurgy and transportation of 
ships overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He 
ceased to publish any more scientific books, with- 
drew from his practical labors and devoted himself 
to the writing and publication of his voluminous 
theological works, which were printed at his own 
expense, or at that of the Duke of Brunswick or 



98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Am- 
sterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor : 
the salary attached to this office continued to be 
paid to him during his life. His duties had 
brought him into intimate acquaintance with King 
Charles XII., by whom he was much consulted and 
honored. The like favor was continued to him by 
his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hop- 
ken says, the most solid memorials on finance were 
from his pen. In Sweden he appears to have at- 
tracted a marked regard. His rare science and 
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight 
and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, 
drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters 
and people about the ports through which he was 
wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy in- 
terfered a little with the importation and publica- 
tion of his religious works, but he seems to have 
kept the friendship of men in power. He was 
never married. He had great modesty and gentle- 
ness of bearing. His habits were simple ; he lived 
on bread, milk and vegetables ; he lived in a house 
situated in a large garden ; he went several times 
to England, where he does not seem to have at- 
tracted any attention whatever from the learned 
or the eminent ; and died at London, March 29, 
1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is 
described, when in London, as a man of a quiet, 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 99 

clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and 
kind to children. He wore a sword when in full 
velvet dress, and, whenever he walked out, carried 
a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait 
of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has a 
wandering or vacant air. 

The genius which was to penetrate the science 
of the age with a far more subtle science ; to pass 
the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim 
spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new relig- 
ion in the world, — began its lessons in quarries 
and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in 
ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is 
perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on 
so many subjects. One is glad to learn that his 
books on mines and metals are held in the highest 
esteem by those who understand these matters. It 
seems that he anticipated much science of the nine- 
teenth century ; anticipated, in astronomy, the dis- 
covery of the seventh planet, — but, unhappily, not 
also of the eighth ; anticipated the views of mod- 
ern astronomy in regard to the generation of earths 
by the sun ; in magnetism, some important experi- 
ments and conclusions of later students ; in chemis- 
try, the atomic theory ; in anatomy, the discoveries 
of Schlichting, Monro and Wilson ; and first de- 
monstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent 
English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his 



100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

discoveries, since he was too great to care to be 
original; and we are to judge, by what he can 
spare, of what remains. 

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, 
uncomprehended by them, and requires a long fo- 
cal distance to be seen ; suggests, as Aristotle, Bar 
con, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of 
learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul 
in nature, is possible. His superb speculation, as 
from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever 
losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, 
almost realizes his own picture, in the " Principia," 
of the original integrity of man. Over and above 
the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capi- 
tal merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has 
the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a 
storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of 
a flute ; strength of a host, as well as of a hero ; 
and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted 
with modern books will most admire the merit of 
mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of 
literature, he is not to be measured by whole col- 
leges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence 
would flutter the gowns of an university. Our 
books are false by being fragmentary ; their sen- 
tences are honmots, and not parts of natural dis- 
course ; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure 
in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 101 

their petulance, or aversion from the order of na- 
ture ; — being some curiosity or oddity, designedly 
not in harmony with nature and purposely framed 
to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing 
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic and 
respective of the world in every sentence ; all the 
means are orderly given ; his faculties work with 
astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing 
is pure from all pertness or egotism. 

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of 
great ideas. It is hard to say what was his own : 
yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the 
universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with 
its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile 
and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant 
with series and degree, with effects and ends, skil- 
ful to discriminate power from form, essence from 
accident, and opening, by its terminology and defi- 
nition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of 
athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the cir- 
culation of the blood ; Gilbert had shown that the 
earth was a magnet ; Descartes, taught by Gilbert's 
magnet, with its vortex, spiral and polarity, had 
filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical 
motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the 
year in which Swedenborg was born, published the 
" Principia," and established the universal gravity. 
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippo- 



102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

crates, Leucippus and Lucretius, had given em- 
phasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts, 
— " tota in minimis existit natura." Unrivalled 
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhock, Winslow, 
Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left 
nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human 
or comparative anatomy: Linnseus, his contempo- 
rary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that 
'' Nature is always like herself : " and, lastly, the 
nobility of method, the largest application of prin- 
ciples, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Chris- 
tian Wolff, in cosmology ; whilst Locke and Gro- 
tius had drawn the moral argument. What was 
left for a genius of the largest calibre but to go 
over their ground and verify and imite? It is easy 
to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg's 
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He 
had a caj)acity to entertain and vivify these volumes 
of thouglit. Yet tlie proximity of these geniuses, 
one or other of whom had introduced all his lead- 
ing ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of 
the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of 
proving originality, the first birth and annunciation 
of one of the laws of nature. 

He named his favorite views the doctrine of 
Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the 
doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. 
His statement of these doctrines deserves to bo 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 103 

studied in his books. Not every man can read 
them, but they will reward him who can. His 
theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. 
His writings would be a sufficient library to a 
lonely and athletic student; and the "Economy 
of the Animal Kingdom " is one of those books 
which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an 
honor to the human race. He had studied spars 
and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid 
knowledge makes his style lustrous with points 
and shooting spiculse of thought, and resembling 
one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles 
with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes 
the grandeur of the style. He was apt for cosmol- 
ogy, because of that native perception of identity 
which made mere size of no account to him. In 
the atom of magnetic iron he saw the quality which 
would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet. 
The thoughts in which he lived were, the univer- 
sality of each law in nature ; the Platonic doctrine 
of the scale or degrees ; the version or conversion 
of each into other, and so the correspondence of 
all the parts; the fine secret that little explains 
large, and large, little; the centrality of man in 
nature, and the connection that subsists through- 
out all things : he saw that the human body was 
strictly universal, or an instrmnent through which 
the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter ; 



104 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

SO that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics, 
that " the wiser a man is, the more will he be a wor- 
shipper of the Deity." In short, he was a believer 
in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, 
as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he 
experimented with and established through years 
of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest 
Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle. 

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, 
and derives perhaps its best illustration from the 
newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means 
perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphor- 
ism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, 
the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to 
another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf 
into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. 
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on 
leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, 
moisture and food determining the form it shall 
assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or 
a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a now 
spine, with a limited power of modifying its form, — 
spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic 
anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, 
being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect 
line, constitute a right angle ; and between the 
lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings 
fold their place : and he assumes the hair-worm, 



SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 105 

the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or predic- 
tion of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the 
spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms ; at 
the end of the arms, new spines, as hands ; at the 
other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. 
At the top of the column she puts out another 
spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span- 
worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extrem- 
ities again : the hands being now the upper jaw, 
the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being 
represented this time by upper and lower teeth. 
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a 
new man on the shoulders of the last. It can al- 
most shed its trunk and manage to live alone, ac- 
cording to the Platonic idea in the Timseus. 
Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in 
the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson 
once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer 
body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digest- 
ing, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new 
and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the 
process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, 
comparing, digesting and assimilating of experi- 
ence. Here again is the mystery of generation re- 
peated. In the brain are male and female facul- 
ties ; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is 
no limit to this ascending scale, but series on se- 
ries. Every thing, at the end of one use, is take» 



106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

up into the next, each series punctually repeating 
every organ and process of the last. We are 
adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and 
love nothing which ends ; and in nature is no end, 
hut every thing at the end of one use is lifted into 
a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs 
into dsemonic and celestial natures. Creative force, 
like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly re- 
peating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, 
in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, 
till it fills earth and heaven with the chant. 

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, 
but grander when we find chemistry only an exten- 
sion of the law of masses into particles, and that 
the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to 
be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort 
of gravitation operative also in the mental phenom- 
ena ; and the terrible tabulation of the French sta- 
tists brings every piece of whim and humor to be 
reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one 
man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats 
shoes or marries his grandmother, then in every 
twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one 
man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. 
What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is 
one fork of a mightier stream for which we have 
yet no name. Astronomy is excellent ; but it must 
come up into life to have its full value, and not re* 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 107 

main there In globes and spaces. The globule o£ 
blood gyrates around its own axis in the human 
veins, as the planet in the sky ; and the circles of 
intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law 
of nature has the like universality ; eating, sleep or 
hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, 
vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. 
These grand rhymes or returns in nature^ — the 
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, 
under a mask so unexpected that we think it the 
face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance 
into divine forms, — delighted the prophetic eye of 
Swedenborg ; and he must be reckoned a leader in 
that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, 
has given to an aimless accumulation of experi- 
ments, guidance and form and a beating heart. 

I own with some regret that his printed works 
amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific 
works being about half of the whole number ; and 
it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited 
remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The 
scientific works have just now been translated into 
English, in an excellent edition. 

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the 
ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained 
from that time neglected ; and now, after their 
century is complete, he has at last found a pupil 
in Mr. Willdnson, in London, a philosophic critic, 



108 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

with a coequal ^dgor of understanding and imagi- 
nation comparable only to Lord Bacon's, who has 
restored his master's buried books to the day, and 
transferred them, with every advantage, from their 
forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world 
in our commercial and conquering tongue. This 
startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hun- 
dred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable 
fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munifi- 
cence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, 
this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable 
preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson 
has enriched these volumes, throw all the contem- 
porary philosophy of England into shade, and leave 
me nothing to say on their proper grounds. 

The "Animal Kingdom" is a book of wonder- 
ful merits. It was written with the highest end, — 
to put science and the soul, long estranged from 
each other, at one again. It was an anatomist's 
account of the human body, in the highest style 
of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brill- 
iant treatment of a subject usually so dry and 
repulsive. He saw nature " wreathing through 
an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, 
on axles that never creak, " and sometimes sought 
" to uncover those secret recesses where Nature is 
sitting at the fires in the depths of her labora« 
tory;" whilst the picture comes recommended by 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 109 

the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical 
anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius 
decides peremptorily for the analytic, against the 
synthetic method ; and, in a book whose genius is 
a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself 
to a rigid experience. 

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and 
how wise was that old answer of Amasis to him 
who bade him drink up the sea, — " Yes, willingly, 
if you will stop the rivers that flow in." Few 
knew as much about nature and her subtle man- 
ners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He 
thought as large a demand is made on our faith by 
nature, as by miracles. " He noted that in her 
proceeding from first principles through her several 
subordinations, there was no state through which 
she did not pass, as if her path lay through all 
things." " For as often as she betakes herself 
upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, 
withdraws herself inward, she instantly as it were 
disappears, while no one knows what has become 
of her, or whither she is gone : so that it is necessary 
to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps." 

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an 
end or final cause gives wonderful animation, a 
sort of personality to the whole writing. This 
book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient 
doctrine of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland ; 



110 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by 
the mass ; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the 
microcosm ; and, in the verses of Lucretius, — 

Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis 
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis 
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari 
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis ; 
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse 
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis ; 
Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse. 

Lib. I. 835. 

" The principle of all things, entrails made 

Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ; 

Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ; 

Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted ; 

Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted : " 

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim 
that "nature exists entire in leasts," — is a favorite 
thought of Swcdenborg. " It is a constant law of 
the organic body that large, compound, or visible 
forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler and 
ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly 
to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more 
universally ; and the least forms so perfectly and 
universally as to involve an idea representative of 
their entire universe." The unities of each organ 
are so many little organs, homogeneous with their 
compound: the unities of the tongue are little 
tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs-, 



SWEDENBORG ; OB, THE MYSTIC. Ill 

those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful 
idea furuishes a key to every secret. What was 
too small for the eye to detect was read by the 
aggregates ; what was too large, by the units. 
There is no end to his application of the thought. 
" Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hun- 
gers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over 
the body." It is a key to his theology also. " Man 
is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to 
the world of spirits and to heaven. Every partic- 
ular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every 
smallest part of his affection, is an image and 
effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only 
a single thought. God is the grand man." 

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of 
nature required a theory of forms also. " Forms 
ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. 
The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and 
corporeal. The second and next higher form is 
the circular, which is also called the perpetual- 
angular, because the circumference of a circle is 
a perpetual angle. The form above this is the 
spiral, parent and measure of circular forms : its 
diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, 
and have a spherical surface for centre ; therefore 
it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above 
this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral : next, the 
perpetual-vortical, or celestial : last, the perpetual- 
celestial, or spiritual." 



112 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take 
the last step also, should conceive that he might 
attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the 
meaning of the world ? In the first volume of the 
" Animal Kingdom," he broaches the subject in a 
remarkable note : — " In our doctrine of Representa- 
tions and Correspondences we shall treat of both 
these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of 
the astonishing things which occur, I will not say 
in the living body only, but throughout nature, and 
which correspond so entirely to supreme and spirit- 
ual things that one would swear that the physical 
world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world ; 
insomuch that if we choose to express any natural 
truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and to 
convert these terms only into the corresponding 
and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a 
spiritual truth or theological dogma, in place of 
the physical truth or precept : although no mortal 
would have predicted that any thing of the kind 
could possibly arise by bare literal transposition ; 
inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately 
from the other, appears to have absolutely no 
relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate 
a number of examples of such correspondences, 
together with a vocabulary containing the terms of 
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things 
for which they are to be substituted. This sym. 
holism pervades the living body." 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 113 

The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in ali 
poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems 
and in the structure of language. Plato knew it, 
as is evident from his twice bisected line in the 
sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had 
found that truth and nature differed only as seal 
and print ; and he instanced some physical propo- 
sitions, with their translation into a moral or po- 
litical sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this 
law in their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as 
far as they are poets, use it ; but it is known to 
them only as the magnet was known for ages, as a 
toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached 
and scientific statement, because it was habitually 
present to him, and never not seen. It was in- 
volved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of 
identity and iteration, because the mental series 
exactly tallies with the material series. It re- 
quired an insight that could rank things in order 
and series ; or rather it required such rightness of 
position that the poles of the eye should coincide 
with the axis of the world. The earth had fed its 
mankind through five or six millenniums, and they 
had sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet had 
failed to see the correspondence of meaning be- 
tween every part and every other part. And, down 
to this hour, literature has no book in which the 
symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One 



114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 

would say that as soon as men had the first hint 
that every sensible object, — animal, rock, river, air, 
— nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor 
finally to a material end, but as a picture-language 
to tell another story of beings and duties, other 
science would be put by, and a science of such 
grand presage would absorb all faculties : that each 
man would ask of all objects what they mean : 
Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy 
and grief, in this centre ? Why hear I the same 
sense from countless differing voices, and read one 
never quite expressed fact in endless picture-lan- 
guage ? Yet whether it be that these things will 
not be intellectually learned, or that many centu- 
ries must elaborate and compose so rare and opu- 
lent a soul, — there is no comet, rock-stratum, fos- 
sil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for 
itself, does not interest more scholars and classi- 
fiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of 
things. 

But Swedenborg was not content with the culi- 
nary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth year 
these thoughts held him fast, and his profound 
mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent 
in religious history, that he was an abnormal per- 
son, to whom was granted the privilege of convers- 
ing with angels and spirits ; and this ecstasy con- 
nected itself with just this office of explaining the 



SIVEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 115 

moral imj^ort of tlie sensible world. To a riglit 
perception, at once broad and minute, of tlie order 
of nature, he added the comprehension of the 
moral laws in their widest social aspects ; but what' 
ever he saw, through some excessive determination 
to form in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, 
but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed 
it in events. When he attempted to announce the 
law most sanely, he was forced to couch it in para- 
ble. 

Modern psychology offers no similar example of 
a deranged balance. The principal powers contin- 
ued to maintain a healthy action, and to a reader 
who can make due allowance in the report for the 
reporter's peculiarities, the results are still instruc- 
tive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime 
laws he announced than any that balanced dulness 
could afford. He attempts to give some account 
of the modus of the new state, affirming that " his 
presence in the spiritual world is attended with a 
certain separation, but only as to the intellectual 
part of his mind, not as to the will part ; " and he 
affirms that "he sees, with the internal sight, the 
things that are in another life, more clearly than 
he sees the things which are here in the world." 

Having adopted the belief that certain books of 
the Old and New Testaments were exact allegories, 
or written in the angelic and ec.static mode, he em- 



116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

ployed his remaining years in extricating from the 
literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from 
Plato the fine fable of " a most ancient people, men 
better than we and dwelling nigher to the gods ; " 
and Swedenborg added that they used the earth 
symbolically ; that these, when they saw terrestrial 
objects, did not think at all about them, but only 
about those which they signified. The correspond- 
ence between thoughts and things henceforward oc- 
cupied him. "The very organic form resembles 
the end inscribed on it." A man is in general and 
in particular an organized justice or injustice, sel- 
fishness or gratitude. And the cause of this har- 
mony he assigned in the Arcana : '' The reason 
why all and single things, in the heavens and on 
earth, are representative, is because they exist from 
an influx of the Lord, through heaven." This de- 
sign of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if 
adequately executed, would bo the poem of the 
world, in which all history and science would play 
an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by 
the exclusively theologic direction which his in- 
quiries took. His perception of nature is not hu- 
man and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. 
He fastens each natural object to a theologic no- 
tion ; — a horse signifies carnal understanding ; a 
tree, perception ; the moon, faith ; a cat means 
this ; an ostrich that ; an artichoke this other ; -^ 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 117 

and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ec- 
clesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so 
easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol 
plays innuriierable parts, as each particle of matter 
circulates in turn through e^/ery system. The cen- 
tral identity enables any one symbol to express suc= 
cessively all the qualities and shades of real being. 
In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every 
hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself 
speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her 
waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be 
taken genially, and we must be at the top of our 
condition to understand any thing rightly. 

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his 
interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of sym- 
bols is yet to be written. But the interpreter 
whom mankind must still expect, will find no pre- 
decessor who has approached so near to the true 
problem. 

Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of 
his books, " Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ ; " 
and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the 
last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have 
a successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical 
wisdom should give him influence as a teacher. 
To the withered traditional church, yielding dry 
catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worship- 
per, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is 



118 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

surprised to find himself a party to the whole of 
his religion. His religion thinks for him and is of 
universal application. He turns it on every side ; 
it fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies 
every circumstance. Instead of a religion which 
visited him diplomatically three or four times, — 
when he was born, when he married, when he fell 
sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never in- 
terfered with him, — here was a teaching which 
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even 
into sleep and dreams ; into his thinking, and 
showed him through what a long ancestry his 
thoughts descend ; into society, and showed by 
v/hat affinities he was girt to his equals and his 
counterparts ; into natural objects, and showed 
tlieir origin and meaning, what are friendly, and 
what are hurtful ; and opened the future world 
by indicating the continuity of the same laws. 
His disciples allege that their intellect is invigor- 
ated by the study of his books. 

There is no such problem for criticism as his 
theological writings, their merits are so command- 
ing, yet such grave deductions must be made. 
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the 
prairie or the desert, and their incongruities are 
like the last deliration. He is superfluously explan- 
atory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men, 
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 119 

nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he 
is a rich discoverer, and of things which most im- 
port us to know. His thought dwells in essential 
resemhlances, like the resemblance of a house to 
the man who built it. He saw things in their law, 
in likeness of function, not of structure. There is 
an invariable method and order in his delivery of 
his truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from 
inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weight- 
iness, — his eye never roving, without one swell of 
vanity, or one look to self in any common form of 
literary pride ! a theoretic or speculative man, but 
whom no practical man in the miiverse could affect 
to scorn. Plato is a gownsman ; his garment, 
though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an 
academic robe and hinders action with its volumi- 
nous folds. But this mystic is awful to Csesar. 
Lycurgus himself would bow. 

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction 
of popular errors, the announcement of ethical 
laws, take him out of comparison with any other 
modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant 
for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. 
That slow but commanding influence which he has 
acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must 
be excessive also, and have its tides, before it sub- 
sides into a permanent amount. Of course what is 
real and universal cannot be confined to the circle 



120 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of those who sympathize strictly with his genius, 
but will pass forth into the common stock of wise 
and just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, 
by which it extracts what is excellent in its chil- 
dren and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of 
the grandest mind. 

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the 
old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid 
and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there 
objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien 
will, — in Swedenborg's mind has a more philo- 
sophic character. It is subjective, or depends 
entirely upon the thought of the person. All 
things in the universe arrange themselves to each 
person anew, according to his ruling love. Man 
is such as his affection and thought are. Man is 
man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of know- 
ing and understanding. As he is, so he sees. 
The marriages of the world are broken up. In- 
teriors associate all in the spiritual world. What- 
ever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. 
Each Satan appears to himself a man ; to those 
as bad as he, a comely man ; to the purified, a 
heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states : every 
thing gravitates : like will to like : what we call 
poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have 
come into a world which is a living poem. Every 
thing: is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and 



SWEDENDORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 121 

beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds 
and wills of men there present. Every one makes 
his own house and state. The ghosts are tor- 
mented with the fear of death and cannot remem- 
ber that they have died. They who are in evil 
and falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as 
have deprived themselves of charity, wander and 
flee : the societies which they approach discover 
their quality and drive them away. The covet- 
ous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells 
where their money is deposited, and these to be 
infested with mice. They who place merit in 
good works seem to themselves to cut wood. " I 
asked such, if they were not wearied? They re- 
plied, that they have not yet done work enough 
to merit heaven." 

He delivers golden sayings which express with 
singular beauty the ethical laws ; as when he 
uttered that famed sentence, that " In heaven the 
angels are advancing continually to the spring- 
time of their youth, so that the oldest angel ap- 
pears the youngest : " " The more angels, the 
more room : " " The perfection of man is the love 
of use : " " Man, in his perfect form, is heaven : " 
" What is from Him, is Him : " " Ends always 
ascend as nature descends." And the truly poetic 
account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, 
as it consists of inflexions according to the form 



122 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of heaven, can be read without instruction. He 
almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, 
by strange insights of the structure of the human 
body and mind. "It is never permitted to any 
one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look 
at the back of his head ; for then the influx which 
is from the Lord is disturbed." The angels, from 
the sound of the voice, know a man's love ; from 
the articulation of the sound, his wisdom ; and 
from the sense of the words, his science. 

In the "Conjugal Love," he has unfolded the 
science of marriage. Of this book one would say 
that with the highest elements it has failed of 
success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, 
which Plato attempted in the " Banquet ; " the 
love, which, Dante says, Casella sang among the 
angels in Paradise ; and which, as rightly cele- 
brated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might 
well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the 
genesis of all institutions, customs and manners. 
The book had been grand if the Hebraism had 
been omitted and the law stated without Gothi- 
cism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension 
of state which the nature of things requires. It 
is a fine Platonic development of the science of 
marriage ; teaching that sex is universal, and 
not local; virility in the male qualifying every 
organ, act, and thought ; and the feminine in 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 123 

woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual world 
the nuptial union is not momentary, but inces- 
sant and total ; and chastity not a local, but a 
universal virtue ; unchastity being discovered as 
much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or 
philosophizing, as in generation ; and that, though 
the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful, the 
wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went 
on increasing in beauty evermore. 

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his 
theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates the 
circumstance of marriage ; and though he finds 
false marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in 
heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and 
friendships are momentary. Do you love me f 
means. Do you see the same truth? If you do, 
we are happy with the same happiness : but pres- 
ently one of us passes into the perception of new 
truth ; — we are divorced, and no tension in nar 
ture can hold us to each other. I laiow how deli- 
cious is this cup of love, — I existing for you, you 
existing for me ; but it is a child's clinging to his 
toy ; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nup- 
tial chamber ; to keep the picture-alphabet through 
which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. 
The Eden of God is bare and grand ; like the out» 
door landscape remembered from the evening fire- 
side, it seems cold and desolate whilst you cowei 



124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity 
those who can forego the magnificence of nature 
fo* candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true 
subject of the " Conjugal Love " is Conversation^ 
whose laws are profoundly set forth. It is false, 
if literally applied to marriage. For God is the 
bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not 
the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. 
We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple 
of one thought, and part, as though we parted 
not, to join another thought in other fellowships 
of joy. So far from there being anything divine 
in the low and proprietary sense of Do you love 
me f it is only when you leave and lose me by 
casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher 
than both of us, that I draw near and find myself 
at your side ; and I am repelled if you fix your 
eye on me and demand love. In fact, in the spir- 
itual world we change sexes every moment. You 
love the worth in me ; then I am your husband : 
but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the 
love ; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of 
worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the 
greater worth in another, and so become his wife. 
He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, 
and is wife or receiver of that influence. 

Whether from a seK-inquisitorial habit that ho 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 125 

grew into from jealousy of the sins to which men 
of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentan- 
gling and demonstrating that particular form of 
moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can 
resist. I refer to his feeling of the profanation of 
thinking to what is good, " from scientifics." " To 
reason about faith, is to doubt and deny." He 
was painfully alive to the difference between know- 
ing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly 
expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, 
cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying 
serpents; literary men are conjurors and charla^ 
tans. 

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that 
here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly 
Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted fac^ 
ulties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to 
depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain ; 
on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and 
mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of 
those chemical ratios which make a proportion in 
volumes necessary to combination, as when gases 
will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any 
rate. It is hard to carry a full cup ; and this mai^ 
profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell 
into dangerous discord with himself. In his Ani- 
mal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring that he 
loved analysis, and nQt synthesis ; and now, after 



126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intel- 
lect ; and though aware that truth is not solitary 
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix 
and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the 
part of the conscience against it, and, on all occa- 
sions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence 
is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love 
is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, 
is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men 
of talent leads to satire and destroys the judgment. 
He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There is 
an air of infinite grief and the sound of wailing aU 
over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre 
sits in the seat of the prophet and turns with 
gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a 
bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a 
mole bore into the ground, than this seer of the 
souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more 
abominable than the last, round every new crew 
of offenders. He was let down through a column 
that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic 
spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the 
unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls and 
hear there, for a long continuance, their lamenta- 
tions : he saw their tormentors, who increase and 
strain pangs to infinity ; he saw the hell of the 
jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the 
lascivious *, the hell of robbers, who kill and boij 



SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 127 

men ; the infernal tun of the deceitful ; the excre- 
nientitious hells ; the hell of the revengeful, whose 
faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their 
arms rotate like a wheel. Except Eabelais and 
Dean Swift nobody ever had such science of filth 
and corruption. 

These books should be used with caution. It is 
dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of 
thought. True in transition, they become false if 
fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, al- 
most a genius equal to his own. But when his 
visions become the stereotyped language of multi- 
tudes of persons of all degrees of age and capacity, 
they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek 
race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent 
and virtuous young men, as j)art of their education, 
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with 
much pomp and graduation, the highest truths 
known to ancient wisdom were taught. An ar- 
dent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or 
twenty years, might read once these books of 
Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and conscience, 
and then throw them aside for ever. Genius is 
ever haunted by similar dreams, when the^ heUs 
and the heavens are opened to it. But these pic- 
tures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite 
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth, — not 
as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good ; 
then this is safely seeii. 



128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Swedenborg's system of the world wants central 
spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks 
power to generate life. There is no individual in 
it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose 
atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order and 
with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What 
seems an individual and a will, is none. There is 
an immense chain of intermediation, extending from 
<3entre to extremes, which bereaves every agency 
of all freedom and character. The universe, in his 
poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only re- 
flects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought 
comes into each mind by influence from a society 
of spirits that surround it, and into these from a 
higher society, and so on. All his types mean the 
same few things. All his figures speak one speech- 
All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who 
they may, to this complexion must they come at 
last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat ; 
kings, counsellors, cavaliers, doctors. Sir Isaac New- 
ton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, 
or whomsoever, and all gather one primness of hue 
and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle 
seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, 
and with a touch of human relentitig remarks, " one 
whom it was given me to believe was Cicero " ; and 
when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth, 
Rome and eloquence have ebbed away, — it is plain 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, TUE MYSTIC. 129 

theologic Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens 
and hells are dull ; fault of want of individualism. 
The thousand - fold relation of men is not there. 
The interest that attaches in nature to each man, 
because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his 
right ; because he defies all dogmatizing and classi- 
fication, so many allowances and contingences and 
futurities are to be taken into account; strong by 
his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues ; — sinks 
into entire sympathy with his society. This want 
reacts to the centre of the system. Though the 
agency of " the Lord " is in every line referred to 
by name^ it never becomes alive. There is no lustre 
in that eye which gazes from the centre and which 
should vivify the immense dependency of beings. 

The vice of Swedenborg's mind is its theologic 
determination. Nothing with him has the liberal- 
ity of universal wisdom, but we are always in a 
church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore 
of right and wrong to men, had the same excess of 
influence for him it has had for the nations. The 
mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine 
is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal 
Vistory, and ever the less an available element in 
education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of 
all modern souls in this department of thought, 
wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and con- 
serve what had abeady arrived at its natural term, 

VOL. IV. 9 



130 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring 
from its prominence, before Western modes of 
thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen 
both failed by attaching themselves to the Chrjstiiuj 
symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which 
carries innumerable Christianities humanities, di- 
vinities, in its bosom. 

The excess of influence shows itself in the incon- 
gruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. ' What 
have I to do ' asks the impatient reader, ' with jas- 
per and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with 
arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods ; what with 
lepers and emerods ; v/hat with heavo-offerings and 
unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons crowned 
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for 
Orientals, these are nothing to me. Tlie more learn- 
ing you bring to explain them, the more glaring 
the impertinence. The more coherent and elabo- 
rate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the 
Spartan, " Why do you speak so much to the pur- 
pose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?" 
My learning is such as God gave me in my birth 
and habit, in the delight and study of my eyes and 
not of another man's. Of all absurdities, this of 
some foreigner proposing to take away my rhetoric 
and substitute his own, and amuse me with peli- 
can and stork, instead of thrush and robin ; palm- 
trees and shittim - wood, instead of sassafras and 
hickory, — seems the most needless.' 



SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC, 131 

Locke said, " God, when he makes the prophet, 
does not unmake the man." Swedenborg's history 
points the remark. The parish disputes in the 
Swedish church between the friends and foes of 
Luther and Melancthon, concerning " faith alone " 
and " works alone," intrude themselves into his 
speculations upon the economy of the universe, and 
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop's 
son, for whom the heavens are opened, so that he 
sees with eyes and in the richest symbolic forms 
the awful truth of things, and utters again in his 
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputa- 
ble secrets of moral nature, — with all these grand- 
eurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran bish- 
op's son; his judgments are those of a Swedish 
polemic, and his vast enlargements purchased by 
adamantine limitations. He carries his controver- 
sial memory with him in his visits to the souls. He 
is like Michael Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the 
cardinal who had offended him to roast under a 
mountain of devils ; or like Dante, who avenged, in 
vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs ; or per- 
haps still more like Montaigne's parish priest, who, 
if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the 
day of doom is come, and the cannibals already 
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not 
less with the pains of Melancthon and Luther and 
Wolfius, and his own boolis, which he advertises 
among the angels. 



132 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his 
dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in 
morals is that evils should be shunned as sins. 
But he does not know what evil is, or what good 
is, who tliinks any ground remains to be occupied, 
after saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I 
doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the 
element of personality of Deity. But nothing is 
added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas, — 
show him that tliis dread is evil : or, one dreads 
hell, — show him that dread is evil. He who 
loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence 
and lives with God. The less we have to do with 
our sins the better. No man can afford to waste 
his moments in compunctions. " That is active 
duty," say the Hindoos, " which is not for our 
bondage ; that is knowledge, wliich is for our lib- 
eration : all other duty is good only unto weari- 
ness." 

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious 
theologic limitation, is his Inferno. Swedenborg 
has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, 
is good in the making. That pure malignity can 
exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It 
is not to be entertained by a rational agent ; it is 
atheism ; it is the last profanation. Euripides 
rightly said, — 

** Goodness and being in the gods are one ; 
He who imputes ill to them makes themi none.'* 



SWEDENDOliG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 133 

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology 
arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion 
for evil spirits I But the divine effort is never 
relaxed ; the carrion in the sun will convert itself 
to grass and flowers ; and man, though in brothels, 
or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is 
good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his 
apostrophe to poor " auld Nickie Ben," 

" wad ye tak a thought, and mend ! " 

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. 
Every thing is superficial and perishes but love 
and truth only. The largest is always the truest 
sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit 
of the Indian Vishnu, — "I am the same to all 
mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my 
love or hatred. They who serve me with adora- 
tion, — I am in them, and they in me. If one 
whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he 
is as respectable as the just man ; he is altogether 
well employed ; he soon becometh of a virtuous 
spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness." 

For the anomalous pretension of Kevelations 
of the other world, — only his probity and genius 
can entitle it to any serious regard. His revela- 
tions destroy their credit by running into detail. 
If a man say that the Holy Ghost has informed 
him that the Last Judgment (or the last of tho 



134 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

judgments), took place in 1757 ; or that the 
Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by 
themselves, and the English in a heaven by them- 
selves; I reply that the Spirit which is holy is 
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors 
of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. 
The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, 
and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates's 
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if 
he purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it 
dissuaded him. " What God is, " he said, " I know 
not ; what he is not, I know." The Hindoos have 
denominated the Supreme Being, the " Internal 
Check." The illuminated Quakers explained their 
Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, 
but it appears as an obstruction to any thing unfit. 
But the right examples are private experiences, 
which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly 
speaking, Swedenborg's revelation is a confounding 
of planes, — a capital offence in so learned a cate- 
gorist. This is to carry the law of surface into 
the plane of substance, to carry individualism and 
its fopperies into the realm of essences and gen- 
erals, — which is dislocation and chaos. 

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. 
No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an 
early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the 
fears of mortals. We should have listened on our 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 135 

knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, 
had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the 
celestial currents and could hint to human ears the 
scenery and circmnstance of the newly parted soul. 
But it is certain that it must tally with what is best 
in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the 
already known works of the artist who sculptures 
the globes of the firmament and writes the moral 
law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler 
than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides 
and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. 
Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads 
when once the penetrating key-note of nature and 
spirit is sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart- 
beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, 
and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees. 

In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer 
has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no 
beauty, no heaven : for angels, goblins. The sad 
muse loves night and death and the pit. His In- 
ferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the 
same relation to the generosities and joys of truth 
of which human souls have already made us cogni- 
zant, as a man's bad dreams bear to his ideal life. 
It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid 
pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which 
nightly turns many an honest gentleman, benevo- 
lent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a 



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136 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

dog about the outer yards and kennels of creation. 
When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear 
its language. A man should not tell me that he 
has walked among the angels ; his proof is that his 
eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be 
less majestic and sweet than the figures that have 
actually walked the earth? These angels that 
Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of 
their discipline and culture : they are all country 
parsons : their heaven is a fete champ Hre^ an 
evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes 
to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, 
passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of 
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits 
doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende ! 
He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the 
world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold- 
headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance 
and the air of a referee, distributes souls. The 
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world 
is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblem- 
atic freemason's procession. How different is 
Jacob Behmen ! he is tremulous with emotion and 
listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity, to 
the Teacher whose lessons he conveys ; and when 
he asserts that, " in some sort, love is greater than 
God," his heart beats so high that the thumping 
against his leathern coat is audible across the cen. 



SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 137 

turies. 'T is a great difference. Behmen is health- 
ily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mys- 
tical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swed- 
enborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accu- 
mulated gifts, paralyzes and repels. 

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens 
a foreground, and, like the breath of morning 
landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is re- 
trospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock 
and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained 
from descending into nature ; others are for ever 
prevented from ascending out of it. With a force 
of many men, he could never break the umbilical 
cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise 
to the platform of pure genius. 

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his per- 
ception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of 
things and the primary relation of mind to matter, 
remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of 
poetic expression, which that perception creates. 
He knew the grammar and rudiments of the 
Mother-Tongue, — how could he not read off one 
strain into music ? Was he like Saadi, who, in 
his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial 
flowers, as presents for his friends ; but the fra- 
grance of the roses so intoxicated him that the 
skirt dropped from his hands ? or is reporting a 
breach of the manners of that heavenly society ? 



138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

or was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and 
hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades 
his books ? Be it as it may, his books have no 
melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to tliQ 
dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate 
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. 
We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No 
bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. 
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a 
mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice 
in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I 
think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His 
great name will turn a sentence. His books have 
become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed 
with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with tlie 
temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the 
spot. 

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at 
the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond 
praise. He lived to purpose : he gave a verdict. 
He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul 
must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many 
opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the 
shipwreck, some cling to ruiming rigging, some to 
cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast ; the 
pilot chooses with science, — I plant myself here ; 
all will sink before this ; " he comes to land who 
sails with me." Do not rely on heavenly favor, or 
on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common 



SWEDENDORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 139 

sense, the old usage and main chance of men : noth- 
ing can keep you, — not fate, nor health, nor ad- 
mirable intellect ; none can keep you, but rectitude 
only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a 
tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, in- 
ventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. 
I think of him as of some transmigrating votary of 
Indian legend, who says 'Though I be dog, or 
jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, 
under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to 
right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and 
to God.' 

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to 
mankind, which is now only beginning to be known. 
By the science of experiment and use, he made his 
first steps : he observed and published the laws of 
nature ; and ascending by just degrees from events 
to their summits and causes, he was fired with piety 
at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to 
his joy and worship. This was his first service. If 
the glory was too bright for his eyes to bear, if ho 
staggered under the trance of delight, the more ex- 
cellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being 
which beam and blaze through him, and which no in- 
firmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure; 
and he renders a second passive service to men, 
not less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle 
of being, — and, in the retributions of spiritual na- 
ture, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself. 



MONTAIGNE; OE, THE SKEPTICo 



IV. 
MONTAIGNE ; OK, THE SKEPTIC. 



Every fact is related on one side to sensation, 
and on the other to morals. The game of thought 
is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to 
find the other : given the upper, to find the under 
side. Nothing so thin but has these two faces, and 
when the observer has seen the obverse, he turns it 
over to see the reverse. Life is a pitching of this 
penny, — heads or tails. We never tire of this 
game, because there is still a slight shudder of as- 
tonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at 
the contrast of the two faces. A man is flushed 
with success, and bethinks himself what this good 
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street ; 
but it occurs that he also is bought and sold. He 
sees the beauty of a human face, and searches the 
cause of that beauty, which must be more beauti- 
ful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, 
cherishes his children ; but he asks himself. Why ? 
and whereto ? This head and this tail are called, 
in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite ; 



144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Relative and Absolute ; Apparent and Real ; and 
many fine names beside. 

Each man is born with a predisposition to one 
or the other of these sides of nature ; and it will 
easily happen that men will be found devoted to 
one or the other. One class has the perception of 
difference, and is conversant with facts and sur- 
faces, cities and persons, and the bringing certain 
things to pass ; — the men of talent and action. 
Another class have the perception of identity, and 
are men of faith and philosophy, men of genius. 

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus 
believes only in philosophers ; Fenelon, in saints ; 
Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty 
language in which Plato and the Platonists speak 
of all men who are not devoted to their own shin- 
ing abstractions : other men are rats and mice. 
The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. 
The correspondence of Pope and Swift describes 
mankind around them as monsters ; and that of 
Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely 
more kind. 

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The 
genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any 
object. Is his eye creative ? Does he not rest in 
angles and colors, but beholds the design ? — he will 
presently undervalue the actual object. In power- 
ful moments, his thought has dissolved the works 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 145 

of art and nature into their causes, so that the 
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a concep- 
tion of beauty which the sculptor cannot embody. 
Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, ex- 
isted first in an artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, 
or friction, which impair the executed models. So 
did the Church, the State, college, court, social cir- 
cle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that 
these men, remembering what they have seen and 
hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the supe- 
riority of ideas. Having at some time seen that 
the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they 
say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous reali- 
zations? and like dreaming beggars they assume to 
speak and act as if these values were already sub- 
stantiated. 

On the other part, the men of toil and trade 
and luxury, — the animal world, including the 
animal in the philosopher and poet also, and the 
practical world, including the painfid drudgeries 
which are never excused to philosopher or poet 
any more than to the rest, — weigh heavily on the 
other side. The trade in our streets believes in 
no metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the 
force which necessitated traders and a trading 
planet to exist: no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, 
wool and salt. The ward meetings, on election 
days, are not softened by any misgiving of the 

VOL. IV. 10 



146 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming 
in a single direction. To the men of this world, 
to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of 
practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man 
of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone 
have reason. 

Things always bring their own philosophy with 
them, that is, prudence. No man acquires prop- 
erty without acquiring with it a little arithmetic 
also. In England, the richest country that ever 
existed, property stands for more, compared with 
personal ability, than in any other. After dinner, 
a man believes less, denies more : verities have 
lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the 
only science : ideas are disturbing, incendiary, 
follies of young men, re]3udiated by the solid por- 
tion of society: and a man comes to be valued 
by his atliletic and animal qualities. Spence re- 
lates that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller 
one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came 
in. "Nephew," said Sir Godfrey, "you have the 
honor of seeing the two greatest men in the 
world." " I don't know how great men you may 
be," said the Guinea man, " but I don't like your 
looks. I have often bought a man much better 
than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten 
guineas." Thus the men of the senses revenge 
themselves on the professors and repay scorn for 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 147 

scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not 
yet ripe, and say more than is true ; the others 
make themselves merry with the philosopher, and 
weigh man by the pound. They believe that mus- 
tard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction- 
matches incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, 
and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is 
much sentiment in a chest of tea ; and a man will 
be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you 
tender and scrupulous, — you must eat more mince- 
pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him 
when he said, — 

" Wer niclit liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang, 
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang ; " — 

and when he advised a young scholar, perplexed 
with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well 
drunk. " The nerves," says Cabanis, " they are 
the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the 
tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is 
sure and speedy spending. For his part, he says, 
he puts his down his neck and gets the good of it. 

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is 
that it runs into indifferentism and then into dis- 
gust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables 
presently. Keep cool : it will be all one a hun- 
dred years hence. Life's well enough, but we 
shall be glad to get out of it, and they will all 
be glad to have us. Why should we fret and 



148 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

drudge? Our meat will taste to-morrow as it 
did yesterday, and we may at last have had 
enough of it. " Ah," said my languid gentleman 
at Oxford, "there's nothing new or true, — and no 
matter." 

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans ; 
our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle 
of hay being carried before him ; he sees nothing 
but the bundle of hay. " There is so much 
trouble in coming into the world," said Lord 
Bolingbroke, " and so much more, as well as 
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly 
worth while to be here at all." I knew a philoso- 
pher of this kidney who was accustomed briefly 
to sum up his experience of human nature in say- 
ing, " Mankind is a damned rascal : " and the 
natural corollary is pretty sure to follow, — ' The 
world lives by humbug, and so will I.' 

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mu- 
tually exasperating each other, and the scoffer 
expressing the worst of materialism, there arises 
a third party to occupy the middle ground be- 
tween these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds 
both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to 
plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. 
He will not go beyond his card. He sees the 
one-sidedness of these men of the street ; he will 
not be a Gibeonite ; he stands for the intellectual 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 149 

faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to keep 
it cool ; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded 
self-devotion, no loss of the brains in toil. Am I 
an ox, or a dray ? — You are both in extremes, he 
says. You that will have all solid, and a world 
of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You be- 
lieve yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant ; 
and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowl- 
edge, you are spinning like bubbles in a river, 
you know not whither or whence, and you are 
bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions. 
Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped 
in a gown. The studious class are their own vic- 
tims ; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, 
their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, 
the day a fear of interruption, — pallor, squalor, 
hunger and egotism. If you come near them and 
see what conceits they entertain, — they are ab- 
stractionists, and spend their days and nights in 
dreaming some dream ; in expecting the homage 
of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, 
but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of 
justness in its application, and of ail energy of will 
in the schemer to embody and vitalize it. 

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I 
know that human strength is not in extremes, but 
in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the 
weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. 



150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 

What is the use of pretending to powers we have 
not ? What is the use of pretending to assurances 
we have not, respecting the other life ? Why ex- 
aggerate the power of virtue ? Why be an angel 
before your time ? These strings, wound up too 
high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, 
and no evidence, why not say just that ? If there 
are conflicting evidences, why not state them ? If 
there is not ground for a candid thinker to make 
up his mind, yea or nay, — why not suspend the 
judgment ? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire 
of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. 
I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the 
case. I am here to consider, o-KOTrctt', to consider 
how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of 
what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off 
theories of society, religion and nature, v/lien I 
know that practical objections lie in the way, in- 
surmountable by me and by my mates ? Why so 
talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can 
pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute ? 
Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when 
v/e know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is ? 
Why think to shut up all things in your narrow 
coop, when we know there are not one or two only, 
but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike ? 
Why fancy that you have all the truth in your 
keeping ? There is much to say on all sides. 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 151 

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that 
there is no practical question on which any thing 
more than an approximate solution can be had? Is 
not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, 
from the beginning of the world, that such as are 
in the institution wish to get out, and such as are 
out wish to get in ? And the reply of Socrates, to 
him who asked whether he should choose a wife, 
still remains reasonable, that " whether he should 
choose one or not, he woidd repent it." Is not 
the State a question ? All society is divided in 
opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves 
it ; great mmibers dislike it and suffer conscien- 
tious scruples to allegiance ; and the only defence 
set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. 
Is it otherwise with the Church ? Or, to put any 
of the questions which touch mankind nearest, — 
shall the young man aim at a leading part in law, 
in politics, in trade ? It will not be pretended 
that a success in either of these kinds is quite 
coincident with what is best and inmost in his 
mind. Shall he then, cutting the stays that hold 
him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no 
guidance but his genius? There is much to say on 
both sides. Remember the open question between 
the present order of "competition" and the friends 
of " attractive and associated labor." The gener- 
ous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared 



152 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

by all ; it is the only honesty ; nothing else is safe. 
It is from the poor man's hut alone that strength 
and virtue come : and yet, on the other side, it is 
alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks the 
spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 
'We have no thoughts.' Culture, how indispen- 
sable ! I cannot forgive you the want of accom- 
plishments ; and yet culture will instantly impair 
that chief est beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent 
is culture for a savage ; but once let him read in 
the book, and he is no longer able not to think of 
Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude 
of understanding consists " in not letting what we 
know be embarrassed by what we do not know,'' 
we ought to secure those advantages which we can 
command, and not risk them by clutching after the 
airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras ! Let 
us go abroad ; let us mix in affairs ; let us learn 
and get and have and climb. " Men are a sort of 
moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part 
of their nourishment from the air. If they keep 
too much at home, they pine." Let us have a 
robust, manly life ; let us know what wo know, for 
certain ; what we have, let it be solid and season- 
able and our own. A world in the hand is worth 
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men 
and women, and not with skipping ghosts. 

This then is the right ground of the skeptic, -=-« 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 153 

this of consideration, of seK-containing ; not at all 
of unbelief ; not at all of universal denying, nor 
of universal doubting, — doubting even that he 
doubts ; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeer- 
ing at all that is stable and good. These are no 
more his moods than are those of religion and phi- 
losophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking 
in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, be- 
lieving that a man has too many enemies than that 
he can afford to be his own foe ; that we cannot 
give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal 
conflict, with powers so vast and unweariable 
ranged on one side, and this little conceited vulner- 
able popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down 
into every danger, on the other. It is a position 
taken up for better defence, as of more safety, and 
one that can be maintained ; and it is one of more 
opportunity and range : as, when we build a house, 
the rule is to set it not too high nor too low, under 
the wind, but out of the dirt. 

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and 
mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too 
stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint 
John, and of nonresistance, seems, on the other 
hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat 
woven of elastic steel, stout as the first and limber 
as the second. We want a ship in these billows 
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would 



154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

be rent to chips and splinters in tliis storm of many 
elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form 
of man, to live at all ; as a shell must dictate the 
architecture of a house founded on the sea. The 
soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just 
as the body of man is the type after which a 
dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the pecu- 
liarity of human nature. ( We are golden averages, 
volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, 
houses founded on the sea. J The wise skeptic 
wishes to have a near view of the best game and 
the chief players ; what is best in the planet ; art 
and nature, places and events ; but mainly men. 
Every thing that is excellent in mankind, — a form 
of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain 
of resources, every one skilful to play and win, — 
he will see and judge. 

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, 
that he have a certain solid and intelligible way of 
living of his own ; some method of answering the 
inevitable needs of human life ; proof that he has 
played with skill and success ; that he has evinced 
the temper, stoutness and the range of qualities 
which, among his contemporaries and countrymen, 
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets 
of life are not shown except to sympathy and like- 
ness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or 
coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 155 

wise limitation, as the modern phrase is ; some 
condition between the extremes, and having, itself, a 
positive quality ; some stark and sufficient man, who 
is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the 
world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the 
same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom 
cities can not overawe, but who uses them, — - is the 
fit person to occupy this ground of speculation. 

These qualities meet in the character of Mon- 
taigne. And yet, since the personal regard which 
I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I 
will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, 
offer, as an apology for electing him as the repre- 
sentative of skepticism, a word or two to explain 
how my love began and grew for this admirable 
gossip. 

A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of 
the Essays remained to me from my father's li- 
brary, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, 
after many years, when I was newly escaped from 
college, I read the book, and procured the remain- 
ing volumes. I remember the delight and wonder 
in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I 
had myself written the book, in some former life, 
so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience. 
It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the 
cemetery of Pere Lachaise, I came to a tomb of 
Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty- 



156 BEPRESKyTATlVE MEX. 

eight years, and who, said the monument, ** lived 
to do right, and had formed himself to virtue ou 
the Essays of Montaigne.'' Some yeai'S later, I 
became acquainted with an accomplished English 
poet, John Sterling : and, in prosecuting my cor- 
res].x>ndence, I found that, from a love of ^lon- 
taigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, 
still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, af- 
t<>r two lumdred and fifty years, had copied from 
the walls of his library the inscriptions which Mon- 
taigne had written there. That Journal of Mr. 
Sterling's, published in the ^Vestminster Eeview, 
Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomena to 
his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure 
that one of the newly-iliscovered autogTaphs of 
"William Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's trans- 
lation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we 
certainly Imow to have been in the poet's library. 
And, odtUy enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, 
which the British Museum purchased with a ^'iew 
of protecting the Shakspeare antogi*aph, (as I was 
informed in the Miisemn,) turned out to have the 
autogi-aph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh 
Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was 
the only gi-eat wi'iter of past times whom he read 
with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not 
needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make 
this old Gascon still new and immortal for me. 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 157 

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, 
then thirty-eight years old, retired from the prac- 
tice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his 
estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure 
and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now 
grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness 
and independence of the country gentleman's life. 
He took up his economy in good earnest, and made 
his farms yield the most. Downright and plain- 
dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to de- 
ceive, he was esteemed in the coimtry for his sense 
and probity. In the civil wars of the League, 
which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne 
kept his gates open and his house without defence. 
All parties freely came and went, his courage and 
honor being universally esteemed. The neighbor- 
ing lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to 
him for safe - keeping. Gibbon reckons, in these 
bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France, 
— Henry IV. and Montaigne. 

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all 
writers. His French freedom runs into grossness ; 
but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of 
his own confessions. In his times, books were 
written to one sex only, and almost all were writ- 
ten in Latin ; so that in a humorist a certain na- 
kedness of statement was permitted, which our 
manners, of a literature addressed equaUy to both 



158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical plain- 
ness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may 
shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the 
offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes 
the most of it : nobody can think or say worse of 
him than he does. He pretends to most of the 
vices ; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, 
it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opin- 
ion, who has not deserved hanging five or six times ; 
and he pretends no exception in his own behalf. 
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, 
" can be told of me, as of any man living." But, 
with all this really superfluous frankness, the opin- 
ion of an invincible probity grows into every read- 
er' s mind. " When I the most strictly and relig- 
iously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I 
have has in it some tincture of vice ; and I, who 
am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that 
stamp as any other whatever, am afraid that Plato, 
in his purest virtue, if he had listened and laid his 
ear close to himself, would have heard some jarring 
sound of human mixture; but faint and remote 
and only to be perceived by himself." 

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color 
or pretence of any kind. He has been in courts so 
long as to have conceived a furious disgust at ap' 
pearances; he will indulge himself with a little 
cursing and swearing ; he will talk with sailors and 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 159 

gipsies, use flash and street ballads ; he has stayed 
in-doors till he is deadly sick ; he will to the open 
air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much 
of gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for 
cannibals ; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that 
he thinks the more barbarous man is, the better he 
is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, 
and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. What- 
ever you get here shall smack of the earth and of 
real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes 
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of 
his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of 
that matter. He took and kept this position of 
equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblem- 
atic pair of scales, and wrote Que sgais je f under 
it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, 
I seem to hear him say, ' You may play old Poz, if 
you will ; you may rail and exaggerate, — I stand 
here for truth, and will not, for all the states and 
churches and revenues and personal reputations 
of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I 
will rather mumble and prose about what I cer- 
tainly know, — my house and barns ; my father, 
my wife and my tenants ; my old lean bald pate ; 
my knives and forks ; what meats I eat and what 
drinks I prefer, and a hundred straws just as ridic- 
ulous, — than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, 
a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and 



160 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, 
and think an undress and old shoes that do not 
pinch my feet, and old friends who do not con- 
strain me, and plain topics where I do not need to 
strain myself and pump my brains, the most suit- 
able. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish 
enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his 
fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into 
some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I 
vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballast- 
ing, the best I can, this dancing balloon ? So, at 
least, I live within compass, keep myself ready for 
action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. 
If there be any thing farcical in such a life, the 
blame is not mine : let it lie at fate's and nature's 
door.' 

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining solilo- 
quy on every random topic that comes into Jiis 
head ; treating every thing without ceremony, yet 
with masculine sense. There have been men with 
deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man 
with such abundance of thoughts : he is never dull, 
never insincere, and has the genius to make the 
reader care for all that he cares for. 

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to 
his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that 
seems less written. It is the language of conversa- 
tion transferred to a book. Cut these words, and 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC 161 

they would bleed ; ttey are vascular and alive. One 
has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening 
to the necessary speech of men about their work, 
when any unusual circumstance gives momentary 
importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and 
teamsters do not trip in their speech ; it is a shower 
of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct them- 
selves and begin again at every half sentence, and, 
moreover, will pun, and refme too much, and 
swerve from the matter to the expression. Mon- 
taigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and 
books and himself, and uses the positive degree; 
never shrieks, or protests, or prays : no weakness, no 
convulsion, no superlative : does not wish to jump 
out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate 
space or time, but is stout and solid ; tastes every 
moment of the day; likes pain because it makes 
him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch 
ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps 
the plain ; he rarely mounts or sinks ; likes to feel 
solid ground and the stones underneath. His writ- 
ing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ; contented, 
self-respecting and keeping the middle of the road. 
There is but one exception, — in his love for Soc- 
rates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek 
flushes and his style rises to passion. 

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, 
in 1592. When he came to die he caused the mass 

VOL. IT. 11 



162 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of 
thirty-three, he had been married. " But," he says, 
" might I have had my own will, I would not have 
married Wisdom herself, if she would have had 
me : but 't is to much purpose to evade it, the 
common custom and use of life will have it so. 
Most of my actions are guided by example, not 
choice." In the hour of death, he gave the same 
weight to custom. Que sgais jef What do I 
know? 

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed 
by translating it into all tongues and printing sev- 
enty-five editions of it in Europe ; and that, too, a 
circulation somewhat chosen, namely among court- 
iers, soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of 
wit and generosity. 

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, 
and given the right and permanent expression of 
the human mind, on the conduct of life ? 

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connec- 
tion between cause and effect, alone interests us. 
We are persuaded that a thread runs through all 
things : all worlds are strung on it, as beads ; and 
men, and events, and life, come to us only because 
of that thread ; they pass and repass only that we 
may know the direction and continuity of that line. 
A book or statement which goes to show that there 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 1C3 

is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of 
nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero 
born from a fool, a fool from a hero, — dispirits us. 
Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent 
makes counterfeit ties ; genius finds the real ones. 
We hearken to the man of science, because we an- 
ticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which 
he uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects, 
preserves ; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. 
One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes 
conserving and constructive : his presence supposes 
a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large in- 
stitutions and empire. If these did not exist, they 
would begin to exist through his endeavors. There- 
fore he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this 
in him very readily. The nonconformist and the 
rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against 
the existing republic, but discover to our sense no 
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, 
though the town and state and way of living, which 
our comisellor contemplated, might be a very mod- 
est or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for 
him, and reject the reformer so long as he comes 
only with axe and crowbar. 

But though we are natural conservers and caus- 
ationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the 
skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have 
reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. 



164 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Every superior mind will pass through this domain 
of equilibration, — I should rather say, will know 
how to avail himself of the checks and balances in 
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggera- 
tion and formalism of bigots and blocklieads. 

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the stu- 
dent in relation to the particulars which society 
adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in 
their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied 
by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Soci- 
ety does not like to have any breath of question 
blown on the existing order. But the interroga- 
tion of custom at all points is an inevitable stage 
in the growth of every superior mind, and is the 
evidence of its perception of the flowing power 
which remains itself in all changes. 

The superior mind will find itself equally at 
odds with the evils of society and with the projects 
that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic 
is a bad citizen ; no conservative, he sees the sel- 
fishness of property and the drowsiness of institu- 
tions. But neither is he fit to work with any demo- 
cratic party that ever was constituted ; for parties 
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the 
popular patriotism. His politics are those of the 
" Soul's Errand " of Sir Walter Kaleigh ; or of 
Krishna, in the Bhagavat, '' There is none who is 
worthy of my love or hatred ; " whilst he sentences 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 1G5 

law, physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He 
is a reformer ; yet he is no better member of the 
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is 
not the champion of the operative, the pauper, the 
prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our 
life in this world is not of quite so easy interpreta= 
tion as churches and £chool-books say. He does 
not wish to take ground against these benevolences, 
to play the part of devil's attorney, and blazon 
every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for 
him. But he says. There are doubts. 

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the 
calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by 
counting and describing these doubts or negations. 
I wish to ferret them out of their holes and sun 
them a little. We must do with them as the police 
do with old rogues, who are shown up to the pub- 
lic at the marshal's office. They will never be so 
formidable when once they have been identified 
and registered. But I mean honestly by them, — 
that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall 
not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to 
be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, 
whether I can dispose of them or they of me, 

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. 
I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. 
'T is of no importance what bats and oxen think. 
The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity 



ICC) REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of intellect ; as if it were fatal to earnestness to 
know mucli. Knowledge is the knowing that we 
can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are 
light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on 
every platform ! but intellect kills it. Nay, San 
Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the 
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct as- 
cension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly 
insight and sends back the votary orphaned. My 
astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and 
saints infected. They found the ark empty ; saw, 
and would not tell ; and tried to choke off their ap- 
proaching followers, by saying, ' Action, action, my 
dear fellows, is for you ! ' Bad as was to me this 
detection by San Carlo, this frost in July, this 
blow from a bride, there was still a worse, namely 
the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of 
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, 
they say, ' We discover that this our homage and 
beatitude is partial and deformed : we must fly 
for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to 
the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the 
gymnastics of talent.' 

This is hobgoblin the first ; and, though it has 
been the subject of much elegy in our nineteenth 
century, from Byron, Goethe and other poets of 
less fame, not to mention many distinguished pri- 
vate observers, — I confess it is not very affecting 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC, 1G7 

to my Imagination ; for it seems to concern the 
shattering of baby - houses and crockery - shops. 
What flutters the Church of Rome, or of England, 
or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far 
from touching any principle of faith. I think that 
the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous | 
and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet 
it supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to 
the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more 
stupendous he finds the natural and moral econ- 
omy, and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance. 

There is the power of moods, each setting at 
nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs. 
There is the power of complexions, obviously modi- 
fying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs 
and unbeliefs appear to be structural ; and as soon 
as each man attains the poise and vivacity which 
allow the whole machinery to play, he will not 
need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate 
all opinions in his own life. Our life is March 
weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go 
forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links 
of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save 
our life : but a book, or a bust, or only the sound 
of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and 
we suddenly believe in will : my finger-ring shall 
be the seal of Solomon ; fate is for imbeciles ; all 
is possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new 



168 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

experience gives a new turn to our thoughts : com- 
mon sense resumes its tyranny ; we say, * Well, the 
army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners and 
poetry : and, look you, -— on the whole, selfishness 
plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce 
and the best citizen.' Are the opinions of a man 
on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the 
mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion ? Is his 
belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach 
evidence ? And what guaranty for the permanence 
of his opinions ? I like not the French celerity, — 
a new Church and State once a week. This is 
the second negation ; and I shall let it pass for 
what it will. As far as it asserts rotation of states 
of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy, 
namely in the record of larger periods. What is 
the mean of many states ; of all the states ? Does 
the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is 
no community of sentiment discoverable in distant 
times and places ? And when it shows the power 
of self-interest, I accept that as part of the divine 
law and must reconcile it with aspiration the best 
I can. 

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense 
of mankind, in all ages, that the laws of the world 
do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush 
us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows 
over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe ; 



MONTAIGNE ; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 169 

Love and Fortune, blind ; and Destiny, deaf. We 
have too little power of resistance against this fe- 
rocity which champs us up. What front can we 
make against these unavoidable, victorious, malefi- 
cent forces ? What can I do against the influence 
of Kace, in my history ? What can I do against 
hereditary and constitutional habits ; against scrof- 
ula, lymph, impotence? against climate, against 
barbarism, in my country ? I can reason down or 
deny every thing, except this perpetual Belly : feed 
he must and will, and I cannot make him respect- 
able. 

But the main resistance which the affirmative 
impulse finds, and one including all others, is in 
the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a pain- 
ful rumor in circulation that we have been prac- 
tised upon in all the principal performances of life, 
and free agency is the emptiest name. We have 
been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, 
with woman, with children, with sciences, with 
events, which leave us exactly where they found 
us. The mathematics, 't is complained, leave the 
mind where they find it : so do all sciences ; and so 
do all events and actions. I find a man who has 
passed through all the sciences, the churl he was ; 
and, through all the offices, learned, civil and so- 
cial, can detect the cliild. We are not the less 



170 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact we 
may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory 
of our state of education, that God is a substance, 
and his method is illusion. The eastern sages 
owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory 
energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the 
whole world is beguiled. 

Or shall I state it thus ? — The astonishment 
of life is the absence of any appearance of recon- 
ciliation between the theory and practice of life. 
Keason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, 
now and then, for a serene and profound moment 
amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have 
no direct bearing on it ; — is then lost for months 
or years, and again found for an interval, to be 
lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in 
fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. 
But what are these cares and works the better? 
A method in the world we do not see, but this par- 
allelism of great and little, which never react on 
each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to 
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, read- 
ings, writings, are nothing to the purpose ; as 
when a man comes into the room it does not ap- 
pear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo, 
— he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre 
as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast is 
the disproportion between the sky of law and the 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 171 

pismire of performance under it, that whether he 
is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter 
as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this en- 
chantment, the stumiing non-intercourse law which 
makes co-operation impossible ? The young spirit 
pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture 
and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He 
has been often baulked* He did not expect a sym- 
pathy with his thought from the village, but he 
went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and 
found no entertainment for it, but mere misappre- 
hension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely 
mistimed and misapplied ; and the excellence of 
each is an inflamed individualism which separates 
him more* 

There are these, and more than these diseases of 
thought, which our ordinary teachers do not at- 
tempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good 
nature inclines us to virtue's side, say. There are 
no doubts, — and lie for the right ? Is life to be 
led in a brave or in a cowardly manner ? and is 
pot the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all 
manliness ? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier 
to that which is virtue ? Can you not believe that 
a man of earnest and burly habit may find small 
good in tea, essays and catechism, and want a 
rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farm- 
mg, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt and 



172 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

terror to make things plain to him; and has he 
not a right to insist on being convinced in his own 
way ? When he is convinced, he will be worth the 
pains. 

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of 
the soul ; unbelief, in denying them. Some minds 
are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they pro- 
fess to entertain are rather a civility or accommo- 
dation to the common discourse of their company. 
They may well give themselves leave to speculate, 
for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to 
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into 
night, but infinite invitation on the other side. 
Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and 
they are encompassed with divinities. Others there 
are to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down 
to the surface of the earth. It is a question of 
temperament, or of more or less immersion in 
nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or 
parasite faith ; not a sight of realities, but an in- 
stinctive reliance on the seers and believers of 
realities. The manners and thoughts of believers 
astonish them and convince them that these have 
seen something which is hid from themselves. But 
their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last 
position, whilst he as inevitably advances ; and pres- 
ently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the 
believer. 



MONTAIGNE; OR, TUE SKEPTIC. 173 

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, im- 
practicable, fantastic, atlieistic, and really men of 
no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven 
to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. 
Charitable souls come with their projects and ask 
his co-operation. How can he hesitate ? It is the 
rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where 
you can, and to turn your sentence with something 
auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he 
is forced to say, ' O, these things will be as they 
must be : what can you do ? These particular 
griefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit of such 
trees as we see growing. It is vain to complain of 
the leaf or the berry ; cut it off, it will bear another 
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower 
down.' The generosities of the day prove an 
intractable element for him. The people's ques- 
tions are not his ; their methods are not his ; and 
against all the dictates of good nature he is driven 
to say he has no pleasure in them. 

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of 
the divine Providence and of the immortality of the 
soul, his neighbors can not put the statement so 
that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more 
faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He 
had rather stand charged with the imbecility of 
skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he says, 
in the moral design of the universe ; it exists hos* 



174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

pitably for the weal of souls ; but your dogmas 
seem to me caricatures : why should I make believe 
them ? Will any say, This is cold and infidel ? 
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They 
will exult in his far-sighted good-will that can 
abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradi- 
tion and common belief, without losing a jot of 
strength. It sees to the end of all transgression. 
George Fox saw that there was "an ocean of dark- 
ness and death ; but withal an infinite ocean of 
light and love which flowed over that of dark- 
ness." 

The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is 
in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its 
supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and 
their weight allowed to all objections : the moral 
sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. 
This is the drop which balances the sea. I play 
with the miscellany of facts, and take those super- 
ficial views which we call skepticism ; but I know 
that they will presently appear to me in that order 
which makes skepticism impossible. A man of 
thought must feel the thought that is parent of 
the universe ; that the masses of nature do undu- 
late and flow. 

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life 
and objects. The world is saturated with deity 
and with law. He is content with just and unjust, 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 175 

with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and 
fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning 
gulf between the ambition of man and his power 
of performance, between the demand and supply of 
power, which makes the tragedy of all souls. 

Charles Fourier announced that " the attractions 
of man are proportioned to his destinies ; " in other 
words, that every desire predicts its own satisfac- 
tion. Yet all experience exhibits the reverse of 
this ; the incompetency of power is the universal 
grief of young and ardent minds. They accuse 
the divine providence of a certain parsimony. It 
has shown the heaven and earth to every child 
and filled him with a desire for the whole ; a desire 
raging, infinite ; a hunger, as of space to be filled 
with planets ; a cry of famine, as of devils for 
souls. Then for the satisfaction, — to each man is 
administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital 
power, per day^ — a cup as large as space, and one 
drop of the water of life in it. Each man woke in 
the morning with an appetite that could eat the 
solar system like a cake ; a spirit for action and 
passion without bounds ; he could lay his hand on 
the morning star ; he could try conclusions with 
gravitation or chemistry ; but, on the first motion 
to prove his strength, — hands, feet, senses, gave 
way and would not serve him. He was an emperor 
deserted by his states, and left to whistle by hinv 



176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

self, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whist- 
ling : and still the sirens sang, " The attractions are 
proportioned to the destinies." In every house, 
in the heart of each maiden and of eacli boy, in the 
soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, — 
between the largest promise of ideal power, and 
the shabby experience. 

The expansive nature of truth comes to our suc- 
cor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps him- 
self by larger generalizations. The lesson of life 
is practically to generalize ; to believe what the 
years and the centuries say, against the hours ; to 
resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate 
to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one 
tiling, and say the reverse. The appearance is im- 
moral ; the residt is moral. Things seem to tend 
downward, to justify despondency, to promote 
rogues, to defeat the just ; and by knaves as by 
martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Al- 
though knaves win in every political struggle, al- 
though society seems to be delivered over from the 
hands of one set of criminals into the hands of an- 
other set of criminals, as fast as the government 
is changed, and the march of civilization is a train 
of felonies, — yet, general ends are somehow an- 
swered. We see, now, events forced on which 
seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. 
But the world-spmt is a good swimmer, and storms 



MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 177 

and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger 
at laws : and so, throughout history, heaven seems 
to affect low and poor means. Through the years 
and the centuries, through evil agents, through 
toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency 
irresistibly streams. 

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in 
the mutable and fleeting ; let him learn to bear the 
disappearance of things he was wont to reverence 
without losing his reverence ; let him learn that he 
is here, not to work but to be worked upon ; and 
that, though abyss open mider abyss, and opinion 
displace opinion, all are at last contained in the 
Eternal Cause : — 

" If my bark sink, 't is to another sea." 

VOL. IV. 13 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 



V. 

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 



Great men are more distinguished by range 
and extent than by originality. If we require the 
originality which consists in weaving, like a spi- 
der, their web from their own bowels ; in finding 
clay and making bricks and building the house ; no 
great men are original. Nor does valuable origi- 
nality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero 
is in the press of knights and the thick of events ; 
and seeing what men want and sharing their de- 
sire, he adds the needful length of sight and of 
arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest 
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no 
rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost, and, be- 
cause he says every thing, saying at last something 
good; but a heart in unison with his time and 
country. There is notliing whimsical and fantas- 
tic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, 
freighted with the weightiest convictions and point- 
ed with the most determined aim which any man 
or class knows of in his times. 



182 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, 
and will not have any individual great, except 
through the general. There is no choice to gen- 
ius. A great man does not wake up on some fine 
morning and say, ' I am full of life, I will go to 
sea and find an Antarctic continent : to-day I will 
square the circle : I will ransack botany and find 
a new food for man : I have a new architecture in 
my mind : I foresee a new mechanic power : ' no, 
but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts 
and events, forced onward by the ideas and neces- 
sities of his contemporaries. He stands where all 
the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all 
point in the direction in which he should go. The 
Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, 
and he carries out the advice which her music gave 
him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants 
and processions. He finds a war raging : it edu- 
cates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters 
the instruction. He finds two counties groping to 
bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of pro- 
duction to the place of consumption, and he hits on 
a railroad. Every master has found his materials 
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with 
his people and in his love of the materials he 
wrought in. What an economy of power ! and 
what a compensation for the shortness of life.^ 
All is done to his hand. The world has brought 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET, 183 

tim thus far on his way. The human race has 
gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hol- 
lows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, 
artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he 
enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, 
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feel- 
ing and history, and he would have all to do for 
himself : his powers would be expended in the first 
preparations. Great genial power, one would al- 
most say, consists in not being original at all ; in 
being altogether receptive ; in letting the world do 
all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass un- 
obstructed through the mind. 

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the Eng- 
lish people were importunate for dramatic enter- 
tainments. The court took offence easily at politi- 
cal allusions and attempted to suppress them. 
The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and 
the religious among the Anglican church, would 
suppress them. But the people wanted them. 
Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extempora- 
neous enclosures at country fairs were the ready 
theatres of strolling players. The people had 
tasted this new joy ; and, as we could not hop e to 
suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strong- 
est party, — neither then coidd king, prelate, or 
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which 
Was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch 



184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

and library, at the same time. Probably king, 
prelate and puritan, all found their own account in 
it. It had become, by all causes, a national inter- 
est, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great 
scholar would have thought of treating it in an 
English history, — but not a whit less considerable 
because it was cheap and of no account, like a 
baker' s-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the 
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this 
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, 
Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, 
Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of the pub- 
lic mind, is of the first importance to the poet who 
works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. 
Here is audience and expectation prepared. In 
the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At 
the time when he left Stratford and went up to 
London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates 
and writers existed in manuscript and were in 
turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of 
Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some 
part of, every week ; the Death of Julius Csesar, 
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never 
tire of ; a shelf full of English history, from the 
chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal 
Henries, which men hear eagerly ; and a string of 
doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish 



SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 185 

voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. 
All the mass has been treated, with more or less 
skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the 
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
longer possible to say who vrrote them first. They 
have been the property of the Theatre so long, and 
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered 
them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or add- 
ing a song, that no man can any longer claim copy- 
right in this work of numbers. Happily, no man 
wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. 
We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. 
They had best lie where they are. 

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, es- 
teemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which 
any experiment could be freely tried. Had the 
prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy ex- 
isted, nothing could have been done. The rude 
warm blood of the living England circulated in the 
play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which 
he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The 
poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which 
he may work, and which, again, may restrain his 
art within the due temperance. It holds him to 
the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, 
and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, 
leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the 
audacities of his imagination In short, the poet 



186 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

owes to liis legend what sculpture owed to tlie tem- 
ple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up 
in subordination to architectui'e. It was tlie orna- 
ment of the temple wall : at first a rude relief 
carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder 
and a head or arm was projected from the wall ^ 
the groups being still arranged with reference to 
the building, which serves also as a frame to hold 
the figures ; and when at last the greatest freedom 
of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing 
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calm- 
ness and continence in the statue. As soon as the 
statue was begun for itself, and with no reference 
to the temple or palace, the art began to decline : 
freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place 
of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which 
the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irri- 
tability of poetic talent found in the accumulated 
dramatic materials to which the people were al- 
ready wonted, and which had a certain excellence 
which no single genius, however extraordinary, 
could hope to create. 

In point of fact it appears that Shakspeare did 
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use 
whatever he found; and the amount of indebted- 
ness may be inferred from Malone's laborious com- 
putations in regard to the First, Second and Third 
parts of Henry VI., in which, " out of 6,043 lines, 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 187 

1,771 were written by some author preceding Shak- 
speare, 2,373 by him, on the foundation laid by his 
predecessors, and 1,899 were entirely his own." 
And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a 
single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's 
sentence is an important piece of external history. 
In Henry VIII. I think I see plainly the cropping 
out of the original rock on which his own finer 
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a 
superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can 
ijiark his lines, and know well their cadence. See 
Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with 
CromweU, where instead of the metre of Shakspeare, 
whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, 
so that reading for the sense will best bring out 
the rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a 
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit 
eloquence. But the play contains through all its 
length unmistakable traits of Sh.akspeare's hand, 
and some passages, as the account of the coronation, 
are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment 
to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhytlmi. 

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better 
fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit 
of design, he augmented his resources; and, at 
that day, our petulant demand for originality was 
not so much pressed. There was no literature for 
the million. The universal reading, the cheap 



188 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

press, were unknown. A great poet who appears 
in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the 
light which is any where radiating. Every intel- 
lectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine 
office to bring to his people ; and he comes to value 
his memory equally with his invention. He is 
therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have 
been derived; whether through translation, whether 
through tradition, whether by travel in distant coun- 
tries, whether by inspiration ; from whatever source, 
they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. 
Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say 
wise things as well as he; only they say a good 
many foolish things, and do not know when they 
have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the 
true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he 
finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer per- 
/r> haps ; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit 
was their wit. And they are librarians and his- 
toriographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was 
heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the 
world, — 

" Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line 
And the tale of Troy divine." 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our 
early literature ; and more recently not only Pope 
and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the 
whol3 society of English writers, a large uuacknowl 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 189 

edged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with 
the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But 
Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, 
drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, 
from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of 
the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from 
Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statins. Then Petrarch, 
Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his benefac- 
tors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious 
translation from William of Lorris and John of 
Meung : Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Ur- 
bino : The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of 
Marie : The House of Fame, from the French or 
Italian : and poor Gower he uses as if he were only 
a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build 
his house. He steals by this apology, — that what 
he takes has no worth where he finds it and the 
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be 
practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man 
having once shown himself capable of original writ- 
ing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writ- 
ings of others at discretion. Thought is the proper^ 
ty of him who can entertain it and of him who can 
adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks 
the use of borrowed thoughts ; but as soon as we 
have learned what to do with them they become our 
own. 

Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is 



190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

retrospective. The learned member of the legisla- 
ture, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and 
votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and 
the now invisible channels by which the senator is 
made aware of their wishes ; the crowd of practical 
and knowing men, who, by correspondence or con- 
versation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes 
and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude 
and resistance of something of their impressiveness. 
As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so 
Locke and Rousseau thmk, for thousands ; and so 
there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, 
Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew ; friends, 
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished 
— which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. 
Did the bard speak with authority ? Did he feel 
himself overmatched by any companion ? The ap- 
peal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there 
at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask con- 
cerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily 
so, yea or nay ? and to have answer, and to rely on 
that ? All the debts which such a man could con- 
tract to other wit would never disturb his conscious- 
ness of originality ; for the ministrations of books 
and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that 
most private reality with which he has conversed. 

It is easy to see that what is best written oi 
done by genius in the world, was no man's work, 



SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 191 

but came by wide social labor, when a thousand 
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our 
English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the 
strength and music of the English language. But 
it was not made by one man, or at one time ; but 
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. 
There never was a time when there was not some 
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its 
energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of 
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and 
forms of the Catholic church, — these collected, 
too, in long periods, from the prayers and medita- 
tions of every saint and sacred writer all over the 
world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect 
to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses of 
which it is composed were already in use in the 
time of Christ, in the Eabbinical forms. He 
picked out the grains of gold. The nervous lan- 
guage of the Common Law, the impressive forms 
of our courts and the precision and substantial 
truth of the legal distinction,^, are the contribution 
of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who 
have lived in the countries where these laws gov- 
ern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excel- 
lence by being translation on translation. There 
never was a time when there was none. All the 
truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and 
all others successively picked out and thrown away. 



J 92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Something like the same process had gone on, long 
before, with the originals of these books. The 
world takes liberties with world -books. Vedas, 
^sop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Ili- 
ad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the 
work of single men. In the composition of such 
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the ma- 
son, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the 
fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time 
with one good word ; every municipal law, every 
trade, every folly of the day ; and the generic cath- 
olic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his 
originality to the originality of all, stands with the 
next age as the recorder and embodiment of his 
own. 

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, 
and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the 
steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries 
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the 
final detachment from the church, and the comple- 
tion of secular plays, from Eerrex and Porrex, and 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession 
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare 
altered, remodelled and finally made his own. 
Elated with success and piqued by the growing 
interest of the problem, they have left no book- 
stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, 
no file of old yellow accounts to decompose \n 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 193 

damp and worms, so keen was the hope to dis^ 
cover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, 
whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether 
he kept scliool, and why he left in his will only his 
second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife. 

There is somewhat touching in the madness with 
which the passing age mischooses the object on 
which all candles shine and all eyes are turned; 
the care with which it registers every trifle touch- 
ing Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the 
Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams; 
and lets pass without a single valuable note the 
founder of another djoiasty, which alone will cause 
the Tudor d;>Tiasty to be remembered, — the man 
who carries tlie Saxon race in him by the inspira- 
tion which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the 
foremost people of the world are now for some ages 
to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not 
another bias. A popidar player ; — nobody sus- 
pected he was the poet of the human race; and the 
secret was kept as faithfidly from poets and intel- 
lectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. 
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human un- 
derstanding for his times, never mentioned his 
name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his 
few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspi- 
cion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he 
was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise 



VOL. IV. 13 



194 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed 
himself, out of all question, the better poet of the 
two. 

If it need wit to know wit, according to the prov- 
erb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of recog- 
nizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years 
after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after 
him ; and I find, among his correspondents and 
acquaintances, the following persons : Theodore 
Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the 
Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Ealeigh, 
John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. 
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles 
Cotton, John Pyra, John Hales, Kej)ler, Vieta, Al- 
bericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all 
of whom exists some token of his having commu- 
nicated, without enumerating many others whom 
doubtless he saw, — Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, 
Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, 
Chapman and the rest. Since the constellation of 
great men who appeared in Greece in the time of 
Pericles, there was never any such society ; — yet 
their genius failed them to find out the best head 
in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetra- 
ble. You cannot see the mountain near. It took 
a century to make it suspected ; and not until two 
centuries had passed, after his death, did any criti' 
cism which we think adequate begin to appear. It 



SIIAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 105 

was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare 
till now ; for he is the father of German literature : 
it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into 
German, by Lessing, and the translation of his 
works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid 
burst of German literature was most intimately 
connected. It was not until the nineteenth cen- 
tury, whose speculative genius is a sort of living 
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find 
such wondering readers. Now, literature, philoso- 
phy and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind 
is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do 
not see. Our ears are educated to music by his 
rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only crit- 
ics who have expressed our convictions with any 
adequate fidelity : but there is in all cultivated 
minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power 
and beauty, which, like Cliristianity, qualifies the 
period. 

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all di- 
rections, advertised the missing facts, offered money 
for any information that will lead to proof, — and 
with what result ? Beside some important illustra- 
tion of the history of the English stage, to which I 
have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts 
touching the property, and dealings in regard to 
property, of the poet. It appears that from year 
to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars' 



196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances 
were his : that he bought an estate in liis native vil- 
lage with his earnings as writer and shareholder ; 
that he lived in the best house in Stratford ; was 
intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions 
in London, as of borrowing money, and the like ; 
that he was a veritable farmer. About the time 
when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rog- 
ers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty- 
five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him 
at different times ; and in all respects ajDpears as a 
good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity 
or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, 
an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any 
striking manner distinguished from otlier actors 
and managers. I admit the importance of this in- 
formation. It was well worth the pains that have 
been taken to procure it. 

But whatever scraps of information concerning 
liis condition these researches may have rescued, 
they can shed no light upon that infinite invention 
which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for 
us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We 
tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, 
schooling, school-mates, earning of money, mar- 
riage, publication of books, celebrity, death ; and 
when we have come to an end of this gossip, no 
ray of relation appears between it and the goddess* 



SHAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POEl 197 

born ; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random 
into tlie " Modern Plutarch," and read any other 
life there, it would have fitted the jwems as well. 
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rain- 
bow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to 
abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, 
Warburton, Dyce and Collier, have wasted their oil. 
The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, 
the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Bet- 
terton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready ded- 
icate their lives to this genius ; him they crown, 
elucidate, obey and express. The genius knows 
them not. The recitation begins ; one golden word 
leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry 
and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own 
inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to 
see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of 
the English stage ; and all I then heard and all I 
now remember of the tragedian was that in which 
the tragedian had no part ; simply Hamlet's ques- 
tion to the ghost : — 

" What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon ? " 

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes 
in to the world's dimension, crowds it with agents 
in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big real- 
ity to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks 



198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green- 
room. Can any biography shed light on the local- 
ities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream ad- 
mits me ? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary 
or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Strat- 
ford, the genesis of that delicate creation ? The 
forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, 
the moonlight of Portia's villa, " the antres vast 
and desarts idle " of Othello's captivity, — where 
is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancel- 
lor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has 
kept one word of those transcendent secrets ? In 
fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, — 
in the Cyclopsean architecture of Egypt and India, 
in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the 
Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scot- 
land, — the Genius draws up the ladder after him, 
when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives 
way to a new age, which sees the works and asks 
in vain for a history. 

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shak- 
speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the 
Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehen- 
sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from 
off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspi- 
rations. Read the antique documents extricated, 
analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce 
and CoUier, and now read one of these skyey 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 199 

sentences, — aerolites, — which seem to have fallen 
out of heaven, and which not your experience but 
the man within the breast has accepted as words 
of fate, and tell me if they match ; if the former 
account in any manner for the latter; or which 
gives the most historical insight into the man. 

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, 
yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of 
Aubrey and Eowe, we have really the information 
which is material; that which describes character 
and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet 
the man and deal with him, would most import 
us to know. We have his recorded convictions 
on those questions which knock for answer at every 
heart, — on life and death, on love, on wealth and 
poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby 
we come at them ; on the characters of men, and 
the influences, occult and open, which affect their 
fortunes ; and on those mysterious and demoniacal 
powers which defy our science and which yet in- 
terweave their malice and their gift in our bright- 
est hours. Who ever read the volume of the 
Sonnets without finding that the poet had there 
revealed, under masks that are no masks to the 
intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love ; the 
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, 
and, at the same time, the most intellectual of 
men? What trait of his private mind has he 



200 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his 
ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, 
what forms and humanities pleased him ; his de- 
light in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in 
cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let 
Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. 
So far from Shakspeare's being the least known, 
he is the one person, in all modern history, known 
to us. What point of morals, of manners, of 
economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of 
the conduct of life, has he not settled? What 
mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? 
What office, or function, or district of man's 
work, has he not remembered ? What king has 
he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon ? 
What maiden has not found him finer than her 
delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? 
What sage has he not outseen ? What gentleman 
has he not instructed in the rudeness of his be- 
havior ? 

Some able and appreciating critics think no 
criticism on Shakspeare valuable that does not 
rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is 
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think 
as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, 
but still think it secondary. He was a full man, 
who liked to talk ; a brain exhaling thoughts and 
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next 



SIIAKSPEARE ; OR, THE POET. 201 

at hand. Had he been less, we should have had 
to consider how well he filled his place, how good 
a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in the 
world. But it turns out that what he has to 
say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention 
from the vehicle ; and he is like some saint whose 
history is to be rendered into all languages, into 
verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut 
up into proverbs ; so that the occasion which gave 
the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or 
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial 
compared with the universality of its application. 
So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book 
of life. He wTote the airs for all our modern 
music : he wrote the text of modern life ; the text 
of manners: he drew the man of England and 
Europe ; the father of the man in America ; he 
drew the man, and described the day, and what is 
done in it : he read the hearts of men and women, 
their probity, and their second thought and wiles ; 
the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by 
which virtues and vices slide into their contraries : 
he could divide the mother's part from the father's 
part in the face of the child, or draw the fine 
demarcations of freedom and of fate : he knew 
the laws of repression which make the police of 
nature : and all the sweets and all the terrors of 
human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly 



202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

as the landscape lies on the eye. And the impor- 
tance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of 
Drama or Epic, out of notice. ' T is like making 
a question concerning the paj)er on which a king's 
message is written. 

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of 
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He 
is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably. A 
good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain 
and think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare's. 
We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, 
for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can 
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of 
subtlety compatible with an individual self, — the 
subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos- 
sibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life 
is the equal endowment of imaginative and of 
lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his 
legend with form and sentiments as if they were 
people who had lived under his roof ; and few 
real men have left such distinct characters as these 
fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet 
as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him 
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. 
An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his fac- 
ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and 
his partiality will presently appear. He has cer« 
tain observations, opinions, topics, which have 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 203 

some accidental prominence, and which he dis- 
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part and 
starves that other part, consulting not the fitness 
of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But 
Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate 
topic ; but all is duly given.; no veins, no curiosi= 
ties ; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner- 
ist is he : he has no discoverable egotism : the 
great he tells greatly ; the small subordinately. 
He is wise without emphasis or assertion ; he is 
strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into 
mountain slopes without effort and by the same 
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as 
well to do the one as the other* This makes that 
equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative and 
love-songs ; a merit so incessant that each reader 
is incredulous of the perception of other readers. 

This power of expression, or of transferring the 
inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes 
him the type of the poet and has added a new 
problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws 
liim into natural history, as a main production of 
the globe, and as announcing new eras and amelio- 
rations. Things were mirrored in his poetry with- 
out loss or blur : he could paint the fine with pre- 
cision, the great with compass, the tragic and the 
comic indifferently and without any distortion or 
favor. He carried his powerful execution into 



204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

minute details, to a liair point ; finishes an eyelash 
or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain ; and 
yet these, like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of 
the solar microscope. 

In short, he is the chief example to prove that 
more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, 
is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make 
one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one 
flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, anc 
then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. Then 
are always objects ; but there was never represen 
tation. Here is perfect representation, at last; ami 
now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. 
No recipe can be given for the making of a Shaks- 
peare ; but the possibility of the translation of 
things into song is demonstrated. 

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. 
The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the 
splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; 
and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of 
the piece ; like the tone of voice of some incom- 
parable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, 
and any clause as unproducible now as a whole 
poem. 

Though the speeches in the plays, and single 
lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause 
on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is 
80 loaded with meaning and so linked with its 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 205 

foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis- 
fied. His means are as admirable as his ends ; 
every subordinate invention, by which he helps 
himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, 
is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and 
walk because his horses are running off with him 
in some distant direction : he always rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience ; but the 
thought has suffered a transformation since it was 
an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good 
degree of skill in writing verses ; but it is easy to 
read, through their poems, their personal history : 
any one acquainted with the parties can name every 
figure ; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The 
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar 
with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's 
mind the fact has gone quite over into the new 
element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. 
This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, 
from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he 
knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a 
trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs to the 
poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no 
man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. He 
loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace : 
he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the 
lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the 



206 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

spirit of joy and hilarity, lie slieds over tlie uni- 
verse. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such 
charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to 
partake of them. And the true bards have been 
noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer 
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and 
Saadi says, " It was rumored abroad that I was 
penitent ; but what had I to do with repentance ? " 
Not less sovereign and cheerful, — much more sov- 
ereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. 
His name suggests joy and emancij)ation to the 
heart of men. If he should appear in any com- 
pany of human souls^ who would not march in his 
troop ? He touches nothing that does not borrow 
health and longevity from his festal style. 

And now, how stands the account of man with 
this bard and benefactor, when, in solitude, shut- 
tino: our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we 
seek to strike the balance ? Solitude has austere 
lessons ; it can teach us to spare both heroes and 
poets ; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him 
to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity. 

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the 
splendor of meaning that plays over the visible 
world ; knew that a tree had another use than for 
apples, and corn another than for meal, and the 
baU of the earth, than for tillage and roads : that 



STIAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 20T 

these tilings bore a second and finer harvest to the 
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and convey- 
ing in all their natural history a certain mute 
commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed 
them as colors to compose his picture. He rested 
in their beauty ; and never took the step which 
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore 
the virtue which resides in these symbols and im- 
parts this power : — what is that which they them- 
selves say? He converted the elements which 
waited on his command, into entertainments. He 
was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as 
if one should have, through majestic powers of 
science, the comets given into his hand, or the 
planets and their moons, and should draw them 
from their orbits to glare with the municipal fire- 
works on a holiday night, and advertise in all 
towns, " Very superior pyrotechny this evening " ? 
Are the agents of nature, and the power to under- 
stand them, worth no more than a street serenade, 
or the breath of a cigar ? One remembers again 
the trumpet-text in the Koran, — " The heavens 
and the earth and all that is between them, think 
ye we have created them in jest?" As long as the 
question is of talent and mental power, the world 
of men has not his equal to show. But when the 
question is, to life and its materials and its auxili- 
aries, how does he profit me ? What does it sig« 



208 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

nify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer- 
Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale : what sig- 
nifies another picture more or less ? The Egyptian 
verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind ; 
that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not 
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men 
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their 
thought ; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
been less, had he reached only the common measure 
of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, 
we might leave the fact in the twilight of human 
fate : but that this man of men, he who gave to the 
science of mind a new and larger subject than had 
ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity 
some furlongs forward into Chaos, — that he should 
not be wise for himself ; — it must even go into the 
world's history that the best poet led an obscure 
and profane life, using his genius for the public 
amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, 
German and Swede, beheld the same objects : they 
also saw through them that which was contained. 
And to what purpose? The beauty straightway 
vanished ; they read commandments, all-excluding 
mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of 
piled mountains, fell on them, and life became 
ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, 
beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's 



SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 209 

fall and curse behind us ; with doomsdays and pur- 
gatorial and penal fires before us ; and the heart 
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in 
them. 

It must be conceded that these are half -views of 
half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a 
reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakspeare the 
player, nor shall grope in graves, with Swedenborg 
the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with 
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten 
the sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private 
affection ; and love is compatible with imiversal 
wisdom. 

VOL. rv. 14 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD. 



VI. 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD. 



Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth 
century, Bonaparte is far the best known and the 
most powerful ; and owes his predominance to 
the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of 
thought and belief, the aims of the masses of 
active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg's 
theory that every organ is made up of homogene- 
ous particles ; or as it is sometimes expressed, 
every whole is made of similars ; that is, the lungs 
are composed of infinitely small lungs ; the liver, 
of infinitely small livers ; the kidney, of little 
kidneys, &c. Following this analogy, if any man 
is found to carry with him the power and affec- 
tions of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if 
Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom, 
he sways are little Napoleons. 

In our society there is a standing antagonism 
between the conservative and the democratic 
classes; between those who have made their 



214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

fortunes, and the young and the poor who have 
fortunes to make ; between the interests of dead 
labor, — that is, the labor of hands long ago still 
in the grave, which labor is now entombed in 
money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by 
idle capitalists, — and the interests of living labor, 
which seeks to possess itself of land and buildings 
and money stocks. The first class is timid, self- 
ish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually 
losing numbers by death. The second class is 
selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always 
outnumbering the other and recruiting its num- 
bers every hour by births. It desires to keep 
open every avenue to the competition of all, and 
to multiply avenues : the class of business men in 
America, in England, in France and throughout 
Europe ; th« class of industry and skill. Napo- 
leon is its representative. The instinct of ac- 
tive, brave, able men, throughout the middle class 
every where, has pointed out Napoleon as the in- 
carnate Democrat. He had their virtues and their 
vices ; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That 
tendency is material, pointing at a sensual suc- 
cess and employing the richest and most various 
means to that end ; conversant with mechanical 
powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately 
learned and skiKul, but subordinating all intel- 
lectual and spiritual forces into means to a mate* 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 215 

rial success. To be the rich man, is the end. 
"God has granted," says the Koran, "to every 
people a prophet in its own tongue." Paris and 
London and New York, the spirit of commerce, of 
money and material power, were also to have their 
prophet ; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. 

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes 
or memoirs or lives of Napoleon, delights in the 
page, because he studies in it his own history. 
Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the high- 
est point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of 
the newspapers. He is no saint, — to use his 
own word, " no capuchin," and he is no hero, in 
the high sense. The man in the street finds in 
him the qualities and powers of other men in the 
street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a 
citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived 
at such a commanding position that he could in- 
dulge all those tastes which the common man 
possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: 
good society, good books, fast travelling, dress, 
dinners, servants without number, personal weight, 
the execution of his ideas, the standing in the 
attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, 
the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, 
palaces and conventional honors, — precisely what 
is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nine- 
teenth century, this powerful man possessed. 



216 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

It is true that a man of Napoleon's truth of 
adaptation to the mind of the masses around him, 
becomes not merely representative but actually a 
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus 
Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every 
good word that was spoken in France. Dumont 
relates that he sat in the gallery of the Conven- 
tion and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It 
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a pero- 
ration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and 
showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord 
Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, 
showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pro- 
nounced it admirable, and declared he would in- 
corporate it into his harangue to-morrow, to the 
Assembly. " It is impossible," said Dumont, " as, 
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin." 
" If you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty 
persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow:" 
and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next 
day's session. For Mirabeau, with his overpower- 
ing personality, felt that these things which his 
presence inspired were as much his own as if he 
had said them, and that his adoption of them 
gave them their weight. Much more absolute and 
centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau's popu- 
larity and to much more than his predominance 
in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon's stamp 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 217 

almost ceases to have a private speech and opin- 
ion. He is so largely receptive, and is so placed, 
that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelli- 
gence, wit and power of the age and country. He 
gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes 
the system of weights and measures ; he levels the 
Alps; he builds the road. All distinguished en- 
gineers, savans, statists, report to him : so likewise 
do all good heads in every kind: he adopts the 
best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not 
these alone, but on every happy and memorable 
expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon 
and every line of his writing, deserves reading, 
as it is the sense of France. 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because 
he had in transcendent degree the qualities and 
powers of common men. There is a certain satis- 
faction in coming down to the lowest ground of 
politics, for we get rid of ^ant and hypocrisy. 
Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great 
class he represented, for power and wealth, — but 
Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the 
means. All the sentiments which embarrass men's 
pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The senti- 
ments were for women and children. Fontanes, in 
1804, expressed Napoleon's own sense, when in be- 
half of the Senate he addressed him, — " Sire, the 
desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever 



218 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

afflicted the human mind." The advocates of lib- 
erty and of progress are " ideologists ; " — a word 
of contempt often in his mouth ; — " Necker is an 
ideologist : " " Lafayette is an ideologist." 

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares 
that " if you would succeed, you must not be too 
good." It is an advantage, within certain limits, to 
have renounced the dominion of the sentmients of 
piety, gratitude and generosity : since what was an 
impassable bar to us, and stiU is to others, becomes 
a convenient weapon for our purposes ; just as the 
river which was a formidable barrier, winter trans- 
forms into the smoothest of roads. 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentmients and 
affections, and would help himself with his hands 
and his head. With him is no miracle and no 
magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, 
in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in 
troops, and a very consistent and wise master-work- 
man. He is never weak and literary, but acts with 
the solidity and the precision of natural agents. 
He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with 
things. Men give way before such a man, as be- 
fore natural events. To be sure there are men 
enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, 
smiths, sailors and mechanics generally; and we 
know how real and solid such men appear in the 
presence of scholars and grammarians : but these 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD, 219 

men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and 
are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte su- 
peradded to this mineral and animal force, insight 
and generalization, so that men saw in him com- 
bined the natural and the intellectual power, as if 
the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to ci- 
pher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presup- 
pose him. He came unto his own and they re- 
ceived him. This ciphering operative knows what 
he is working with and what is the product. He 
knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and 
ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that 
each should do after its kind. 

The art of war was the game in which he exerted 
his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in 
having always more forces than the enemy, on the 
point where the enemy is attacked, or where he at- 
tacks : and his whole talent is strained by endless 
manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the 
enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. 
It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and 
rapidly manoeuvring so as always to bring two men 
against one at the point of engagement, will be an 
overmatch for a much larger body of men. 

The times, his constitution and his early circum- 
stances combined to develop this pattern democrat. 
He had the virtues of his class and the conditions 
for their activity. That common-sense which no 



220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

sooner respects any end than it finds the means to 
effect it ; the delight in the use of means ; in the 
choice, simplification and combining of means ; the 
directness and thoroughness of his work ; the pru- 
dence with which all was seen and the energy with 
which all was done, make him the natural organ 
and head of what I may almost call, from its ex- 
tent, the modern party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share in every 
success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, 
and such a man was born ; a man of stone and 
iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or sev- 
enteen hours, of going many days together without 
rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed 
and spring of a tiger in action ; a man not embar- 
rassed by any scruples ; compact, instant, selfish, 
prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer 
itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of 
others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of 
his own. "My hand of iron" he said, "was not at 
the extremity of my arm, it was immediately con- 
nected with my head." He respected the power 
of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his su- 
periority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior 
men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with 
nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his 
star ; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, 
when he styled himself the "Child of Destiny." 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 221 

" They charge me," he said, " with the commission 
of great crimes : men of my stamp do not commit 
crimes. Nothing has been more simple than my 
elevation, 't is in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or 
crime ; it was owing to the peculiarity of the times 
and to my reputation of having fought well against 
the enemies of my country. I have always marched 
with the opinion of great masses and with events. 
Of what use then would crimes be to me ? " Again 
he said, speaking of his son, " My son can not re- 
place me ; I could not replace myself. I am the 
creature of circumstances." 

He had a directness of action never before com- 
bined with so much comprehension. He is a real- 
ist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscur- 
ing persons. He sees where the matter hinges, 
throws himself* on the precise point of resistance, 
and slights all other considerations. He is strong 
in the right manner, namely by insight. He never 
blundered into victory, but won his battles in his 
head before he won them on the field. His prin- 
cipal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no 
other. In 1796 he writes to the Directory: ''I 
have conducted the campaign without consulting 
any one. I should have done no good if I had been 
under the necessity of conforming to the notions of 
another person. I have gained some advantages 
over superior forces and when totally destitute of 



222 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

every tiling, because, in the persuasion that your 
confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as 
prompt as my thoughts." 

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecil- 
ity of kings and governors. They are a class of 
persons much to be pitied, for they know not what 
they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and 
the king and his ministers, knowing not what to 
do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon un- 
derstood his business. Here was a man who in 
each moment and emergency knew what to do next. 
It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the 
spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few 
men have any next ; they live from hand to mouth, 
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, 
and after each action wait for an impulse from 
abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the 
world, if his ends had been purely public. As he 
is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraor- 
dinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, self- 
denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing, — 
money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, 
to his aim ; not misled, like common adventurers, 
by the splendor of his own means. " Incidents 
ought not to govern policy," he said, " but policy, 
incidents." " To be hurried away by every event 
is to have no political system at all." His vic« 
tories were only so many doors, and he never for a 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 223 

moment lost sight of his way onward, in the daz- 
zle and uproar of the present circumstance. He 
Iniew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He 
would shorten a straight line to come at his object. 
Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from 
his history, of the price at which he bought his suc- 
cesses ; but he must not therefore be set down as 
cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to 
his will ; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, — but woe to 
what thing or person stood in his way ! Not blood- 
thirsty, but not sparing of blood, — and pitiless. 
He saw only the object: the obstacle must give 
way. " Sire, General Clarke can not combine with 
General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Aus- 
trian battery." — " Let him carry the battery." 
— " Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy 
artillery is sacrificed : Sire, what orders ? " — " For- 
ward, forward ! " Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, 
gives, in his " Military Memoirs," the following 
sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz. — 
" At the moment in which the Russian army was 
making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on 
the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came 
riding at full speed toward the artillery. "You 
are losing time," he cried; "fire upon those masses; 
they must be engulfed : fire upon the ice ! " The 
order remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In 
rain several officers and myself were placed on the 



224 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

slope of a hill to produce the effect : their balls and 
mine rolled upon the ice without breaking it up. 
Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating 
light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of 
the heavy projectiles produced the desired effect. 
My method was immediately followed by the ad- 
joining batteries, and in less than no time we bur- 
ied " some ^ " thousands of Eussians and Austrians 
under the waters of the lake." 

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle 
seemed to vanish. " There shall be no Alps," he 
said ; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by 
graded galleries their steepest precijDices, until Italy 
was as open to Paris as any town in France. He 
laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Hav- 
ing decided what was to be done, he did that with 
might and main. He put out all his strength. He 
I'isked every thing and spared nothing, neither am- 
munition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor 
himself. 

We like to see every thing do its office after its 
kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattle-snake ; 
and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting 
national differences, (as large majorities of men 
seem to agree,) certainly Bonaparte was right in 
making it thorough. The ^Tand principle of war, 

^ As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruziei; 
I dare not adopt the high figure I find. 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 225 

he said, was that an army ought always to be ready, 
by day and by night and at all hours, to make all 
the resistance it is capable of making. He never 
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile posi- 
tion, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, gTape- 
shot, — to annihilate all defence. On any point 
of resistance he concentrated squadron on squad- 
ron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept 
out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chas- 
seurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of 
Jena, Napoleon said, " My lads, you must not fear 
death ; when soldiers brave death, they drive him 
into the enemy's ranks." In the fury of assault, 
he no more spared himself. He went to the edge 
of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did 
what he could, and all that he could. He came, 
several times, within an inch of ruin ; and his own 
person was all but lost. He was flung into the 
marsh at Areola. The Austrians were between him 
and his troops, in the melee^ and he was brought 
off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other 
places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. 
He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. 
Each victory was a new weapon. "My power 
would fall, were I not to support it by new achieve- 
ments. Conquest has made me what I am, and 
conquest must maintain me." He felt, with every 
wise man, that as much life is needed for conserva* 

VOL. IV. 15 



226 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

tion as for creation. We are always in peril, 
always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruc- 
tion and only to be saved by invention and courage. 

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the 
coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt 
in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his 
intrenchments. His very attack was never the in- 
spiration of courage, but the result of calculation. 
His idea of the best defence consists in being still 
the attacking party. " My ambition," he says, 
"was great, but was of a cold nature." In one 
of his conversations with Las Casas, he remarked, 
" As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the 
two-o'clock-in-the-morning kind : I mean unpre- 
pared courage ; that which is necessary on an un- 
expected occasion, and which, in spite of the most 
unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment 
and decision : " and he did not hesitate to declare 
that he was himself eminently endowed with this 
two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he 
had met with few persons equal to himself in this 
respect. 

Every thing depended on the nicety of his com- 
binations, and the stars were not more punctual 
than his arithmetic. His personal attention de- 
scended to the smallest particulars. " At Monte- 
bello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight 
hundred horse, and with these he separated the 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 227 

six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very 
eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was 
half a league off and required a quarter of an 
hour to arrive on the field of action, and I have 
observed that it is always these quarters of an hour 
that decide the fate of a battle." " Before he 
fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little about 
what he should do in case of success, but a great 
deal about what he should do in case of a reverse 
of fortune." The same prudence and good sense 
mark all his behavior. His instructions to his 
secretary at the Tuileries are worth remembering. 
" During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as 
possible. Do not awake me when you have any 
good news to communicate ; with that there is no 
hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me 
instantly, for then there is not a moment to be 
lost." It was a whimsical economy of the same 
kind which dictated his practice, when general in 
Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. 
He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened 
for three weeks, and then observed with satisfac- 
tion how large a part of the correspondence had 
thus disposed of itself and no longer required an 
answer. His achievement of business was immense, 
aiid enlarges the known powers of man. There 
have been many working kings, from Ulysses to 
William of Orange, but none who accomplished a 
tithe of this man's performance. 



228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the ad- 
vantage of having been born to a private and hum- 
ble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness 
of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the pre- 
scription of aristocracy ; but he knew his debt to 
his austere education, and made no secret of his 
contempt for the born kings, and for " the heredi- 
tary asses," as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. 
He said that " in their exile they had learned noth- 
ing, and forgot nothing." Bonaparte had passed 
through all the degrees of military service, but also 
was citizen before he was emperor, and so has 
the key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates 
discover the information and justness of measure- 
ment of the middle class. Those who had to deal 
with him found that he was not to be imposed 
upon, but could cipher as well as another man., 
This appears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated 
at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, 
of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated 
great debts. Napoleon examined the bills of the 
creditors himself, detected overcharges and errors, 
and reduced the claims by considerable sums. 

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he 
directed, he owed to the representative character 
which clothed him. He interests us as he stands 
for France and for Europe ; and he exists as cap- 
tain and king only as far as the devolution, or the 



J 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 229 

interest of the industrious masses, found an organ 
and a leader in him. In the social interests, he 
knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw 
himself naturally on that side. I like an incident 
mentioned by one of his biographers at St. He- 
lena. " When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some 
servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the 
road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather 
an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, 
saying ' Respect the burden, Madam.' " In the 
time of the empire he directed attention to the im- 
provement and embellishment of the markets of 
the capital. " The market-place," he said, " is the 
Louvre of the common people." The principal 
works that have survived him are his magnificent 
roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a 
sort of freedom and companionship grew up be- 
tween him and them, which the forms of his court 
never permitted between the officers and himself. 
They performed, under his eye, that which no 
others could do. The best document of his relatioii 
to his troops is the order of the day on the morn- 
ing of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon 
promises the troops that he will keep his person 
out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the 
reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and 
sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently ex« 
plains the devotion of the army to their leader. 



230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

But though there is in particulars this identity 
between Napoleon and the mass of the people, his 
real strength lay in their conviction that he was 
their representative in his genius and aims, not only 
when he courted, but when he controlled, and even 
when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He 
knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to phi- 
losophize on liberty and equality ; and when allusion 
was made to the precious blood of centuries, which 
was spilled by the killing of the Due d'Enghien, 
he suggested, " Neither is my blood ditch-water." 
The people felt that no longer the throne was oc- 
cupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by 
a small class of legitimates, secluded from all com- 
munity with the children of the soil, and holding 
the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten 
state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man 
of themselves held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and 
ideas like their own, opening of course to them and 
their children all places of power and trust. The 
day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the 
means and opportunities of young men, was ended, 
and a day of expansion and demand was come. A 
market for all the powers and productions of man 
was opened ; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes 
of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal 
France was changed into a young Ohio or New 
York ; and those who smarted under the immediate 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 231 

rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the 
necessary severities of the military system which 
had driven out the oppressor. And even when the 
majority of the people had begun to ask whether 
they had really gained any thing under the exliaust- 
ing levies of men and money of the new master, 
the whole talent of the country, in every rank and 
kindred, took his part and defended him as its nat- 
ural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely on the 
higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him, 
" Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my 
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs." 

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The 
necessity of his position required a hospitality to 
every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts ; 
and his feeling went along with this policy. Like 
every suj^erior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire 
for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his 
power with other masters, and an impatience of 
fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men 
and found none. "Good God!" he said, "how 
rare men are ! There are eighteen millions in 
Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, — 
Dandolo and Melzi." In later years, with larger 
experience, his respect for mankind was not in- 
creased. In a moment of bitterness he said to 
one of his oldest friends, " Men deserve the con- 
tempt with which they inspire me. I have only to 



232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

put some gold-lace on the coat of my virtuous re- 
publicans and they immediately become just what 
I wish them." This impatience at levity was, how- 
ever, an oblique tribute of resj)ect to those able 
persons who commanded his regard not only when 
he found them friends and coadjutors but also 
when they resisted his will. He could not con- 
f oimd Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and Berna- 
dotte, with the danglers of his court ; and in spite 
of the detraction which his systematic egotism dic- 
tated toward the great captains who conquered 
with and for him, ample acknowledgments are 
made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, 
Massena, Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt 
himself their patron and the founder of their for- 
tunes, as when he said " I made my generals out of 
mud," — he could not hide his satisfaction in re- 
ceiving from them a seconding and support com- 
mensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In 
the Russian campaign he was so much impressed by 
the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he 
said, " I harve two hundred millions in my coffers, 
and I would give them all for Ney." The charac- 
ters which he has drawn of several of his marshals 
are discriminating, and though they did not con- 
tent the insatiable vanity of French officers, are no 
doubt substantially just. And in fact every species 
of merit was sought and advanced under his gov- 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 233 

ernment. "I know" he said, "the depth and 
draught of water of every one of my generals." 
Natural power was sure to be well received at his 
court. Seventeen men in his time were raised from 
common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, 
duke, or general ; and the crosses of his Legion of 
Honor were given to personal valor, and not to 
family connexion. " When soldiers have been bap- 
tized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one 
rank in my eyes." 

When a natural king becomes a titular king, 
every body is pleased and satisfied. The Revolu- 
tion entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg 
St. Antoine, and every horse - boy and powder- 
monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh 
of his flesh and the creature of Ms party : but 
there is something in the success of grand talent 
which enlists an universal sympathy. For in the 
prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and 
malversation, all reasonable men have an interest ; 
and as intellectual beings we feel the air purified 
by the electric shock, when material force is over- 
thrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we 
are removed out of the reach of local and acciden- 
tal partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for 
him ; these are honest victories ; this strong steam- 
engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the 
imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of 



234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

human ability, wonderfully encourages and liber- 
ates us. This capacious head, revolving and dis- 
posing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating 
such multitudes of agents ; this eye, which looked 
through Europe ; this prompt invention ; this inex- 
haustible resource : — what events ! what romantic 
pictures ! what strange situations ! — when spying 
the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea ; drawing 
up his army for battle in sight of the Pyramids, 
and saying to his troops, " From the tops of those 
pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;" ford- 
ing the Eed Sea ; wading in the gulf of the Isth- 
mus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic 
projects agitated him. " Had Acre fallen, I should 
have changed the face of the world." His army, 
on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was 
the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, 
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards 
taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, 
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts 
glaring ; as when he pleased himself with making 
kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris 
and at Erfurt. 

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecis- 
ion and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate 
ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took 
occasion by the beard, and showed us how much 
may be accomplished by the mere force of such vir-. 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 235 

tues as all men possess in less degrees ; namely, by 
l^unctuality, by personal attention, by courage and 
thoroughness. " The Austrians " he said, " do not 
know the value of time." I should cite him, in his 
earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power 
does not consist in any wild or extravagant force ; 
in any enthusiasm like Mahomet's, or singular 
power of persuasion ; but in the exercise of com- 
mon-sense on each emergency, instead of abiding 
by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is 
that which vigor always teaches ; — that there is 
always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly 
doubts is not that man's life an answer. When he 
appeared it was the belief of all military men that 
there could be nothing new in war ; as it is the be- 
lief of men to-day that nothing new can be under- 
taken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in 
trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and 
customs ; and as it is at all times the belief of so- 
ciety that the world is used up. But Bonaparte 
knew better than society ; and moreover knew that 
he knew better. I think all men know better than 
they do ; know that the institutions we so volubly 
commend are go-carts and baubles ; but they dare 
not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on 
his own sense, and did not care a bean for other 
people's. The world treated his novelties just as it 
treats everybody's novelties, — made infinite objec- 



236 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

tion, mustered all the impediments ; but he snapped 
his finger at their objections. " What creates great 
difficulty " he remarks, " in the profession of the 
land -commander, is the necessity of feeding so 
many men and animals. If he allows himself to be 
guided by the commissaries he will never stir, and 
all his expeditions will fail." An example of his 
common-sense is what he says of the passage of the 
Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating 
after the other, had described as impracticable. 
"The winter," says Napoleon, "is not the most 
unfavorable season for the passage of lofty moun- 
tains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, 
and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the 
real and only danger to be apprehended in the 
Alps. On those high mountains there are often 
very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with ex- 
treme calmness in the air." Read his account, too, 
of the way in which battles are gained. " In all 
battles a moment occurs when the bravest troops, 
after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined 
to run. That terror proceeds from a want of con- 
fidence in their own courage, and it only requires a 
slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence 
to them. The art is, to give rise to ^^^he opportu- 
nity and to invent the pretence. At Areola I won 
the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that 
moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, 



NAPOLEON; OB, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 237 

and gained the day with this handful. You see 
that two armies are two bodies which meet and en- 
deavor to frighten each other ; a moment of panic 
occurs, and that moment must be turned to advan- 
tage. When a man has been present in many ac- 
tions, he distinguishes that moment without diffi- 
culty : it is as easy as casting up an addition." 

This deputy of the nineteenth century added 
to his gifts a capacity for speculation on general 
topics. He delighted in running through the 
range of practical, of literary and of abstract ques- 
tions. His opinion is always original and to the 
purpose. On the voyage to Egypt he liked, 
after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to 
support a proposition, and as many to oppose it. 
He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on 
questions of religion, the different kinds of gov- 
ernment and the art of war. One day he asked 
whether the planets were inhabited ? On another, 
what was the age of the world? Then he pro- 
posed to consider the probability of the destruction 
of the globe, either by water or by fire : at an- 
other time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, 
and the interpretation of dreams. He was very 
fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed 
with Fournier, bishop of Montpellier, on matters 
of theology. There were two points on which they 
could not agree, viz. that of hell, and that of salva« 



238 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

tion out of tlie pale of the church. The Emperor 
told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on 
these two points, on which the bishop was inexora- 
ble. To the philosophers he readily yielded all 
that was proved against religion as the work of 
men and time, but he would not hear of material- 
ism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of 
materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and 
said, " You may talk as long as you please, gen- 
tlemen, but who made all that ? " He delighted 
in the conversation of men of science, particularly 
of Monge and BerthoUet ; but the men of let- 
ters he slighted ; they were " manufacturers of 
phrases." Of medicine too he was fond of talk- 
ing, and with those of its practitioners whom he 
most esteemed, — with Corvisart at Paris, and 
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. " Believe me," 
he said to the last, ^'we had better leave off all 
thesQ remedies : life is a fortress which neither you 
nor I kuQW ^iiything about. Why throw obsta- 
cles in the way pf its defence? Its own means 
are superior to all the apparatus of your labora- 
tories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all 
your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medi- 
cine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the 
results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal 
than useful to mankind. Water, air and cleanli- 
ness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia." 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 239 

His memoirs, dictated to Coimt Montholon and 
General Gourgaud at St. Helena, have great value, 
after all the deduction that it seems is to be made 
from them on account of his known disingenuous- 
ness. He has the good-nature of strength and 
conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear 
narrative of his battles; — -good as Caesar's; his 
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of 
Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists ; and 
his own equality as a writer to his varying sub- 
ject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign 
in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In in- 
tervals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace. 
Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing 
on abstract questions the native appetite for truth 
and the impatience of words he was wont to show 
in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, 
a romance, a hon mot^ as well as a stratagem in a 
campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine 
and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by 
the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and 
dramatic power lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the mid- 
dle class of modern society ; of the throng who fill 
the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, 
ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He 
was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the 



240 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the in- 
ventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, 
the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course 
the rich and aristocratic did not like him. Eng- 
land, the centre of capital, and Eome and Austria, 
centres of tradition and genealogy, opposed him. 
The consternation of the dull and conservative 
classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old 
women of the Roman conclave, who in their de- 
spair took hold of any thing, and would cling to 
red-hot iron, — the vain attempts of statists to 
amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria 
to bribe him ; and the instinct of the young, ardent 
and active men every where, which pointed him 
out as the giant of the middle class, make his his- 
tory bright and commanding. He had the virtues 
of the masses of his constituents : he had also their 
vices. I am sorry that the brilliant picture has its 
reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we 
discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treach- 
erous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening 
of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we 
should find the same fact in the history of this 
champion, who proposed to himself simply a brill- 
iant career, without any stipulation or scruple con- 
cerning the means. 

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous 
sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 241 

most cultivated age and population of the world, — 
he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. 
He is unjust to his generals ; egotistic and monop- 
olizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great 
actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte ; in- 
triguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless 
bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance 
from Paris, because the familiarity of his man- 
ners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a 
boundless liar. The official paper, his " Moniteur," 
and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what 
he wished to be believed ; and worse, — he sat, in 
his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly 
falsifying facts and dates and characters, and giv- 
ing to history a theatrical Sclat. Like all French- 
men he has a passion for stage effect. Every ac- 
tion that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this 
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul, are all French. 
" I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give 
the liberty of the press, my power could not last 
three days." To make a great noise is his favorite 
design. " A great reputation is a great noise : the 
more there is made, the farther off it is heard. 
Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall ; 
but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages." 
His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His 
theory of influence is not flattering. " There are 

VOL. IV. 16 



242 REPRESENTATIVE MEN, 

two levers for moving men, —interest and fear. 
Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friend- 
ship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even 
love my brothers : perhaps Joseph a little, from 
habit, and because he is my elder ; and Duroc, I 
love him too ; but why ? — because his character 
pleases me : he is stern and resolute, and I believe 
the fellow never shed a tear. For my part I know 
very well that I have no true friends. As long as 
I continue to be what I am, I may have as many 
pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility 
to women ; but men should be firm in heart and 
purpose, or they should have nothing to do with 
war and government." He was thoroughly unscru- 
pulous, tie would steal, slander, assassinate, drown 
and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no 
generosity, but mere vulgar hatred ; he was in- 
tensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at 
cards ; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened let- 
ters, and delighted in his infamous police, and 
rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted 
some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and 
women about him, boasting that " he knew every 
thing ; " and interfered with the cutting the dresses 
of the women ; and listened after the hurrahs and 
the compliments of the street, incognito. His man- 
ners were coarse. He treated women with low 
familiarity. He had the habit of pidling their ears 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 243 

and pincliing their cheeks when he was in good 
humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of 
men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to 
his last days. It does not appear that he listened 
at key-holes, or at least that he was caught at it. 
In short, when you have penetrated through all the 
circles of power and splendor, you were not deal- 
ing with a gentleman, at last ; but with an impostor 
and a rogue ; and he fully deserves the epithet of 
Jit^nter Scapin^ or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 

In describing the two parties into which modern 
society divides itself, — the democrat and the con- 
servative, — I said, Bonaparte represents the Dem- 
ocrat, or the party of men of business, against the 
stationary or conservative party. I omitted then 
to say, what is material to the statement, namely 
that these two parties differ only as young and old. 
The democrat is a young conservative ; the conser- 
vative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the 
democrat ripe and gone to seed; — because both 
parties stand on the one ground of the supreme 
value of property, which one endeavors to get, and 
the other to keej). Bonaparte may be said to rep- 
resent the whole history of this party, its youth and 
its age ; yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his 
own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, 
stiU waits for its organ and representative, in a 



244 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

lover and a man of truly public and universal 
aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the most favora- 
ble conditions, of the powers of intellect without 
conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed 
and so weaponed; never leader found such aids 
and followers. And what was the result of this vast 
talent and power, of these immense armies, burned 
cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of 
men, of this demoralized Europe ? It came to no 
result. All passed away lilie the smoke of his ar- 
tillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, 
poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole 
contest for freedom was to be begun again. The 
attempt was in principle suicidal. France served 
him with life and limb and estate, as long as it 
could identify its interest with him ; but when men 
saw that after victory was another war ; after the 
destruction of armies, new conscriptions ; and they 
who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to 
the reward, — they could not spend what they had 
earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in 
their chateaux, — they deserted him. Men found 
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other 
men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a 
succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of 
it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of 
the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers ; 



NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 245 

and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, 
until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this ex- 
orbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and ab- 
sorbed the power and existence of those who served 
him ; and the universal cry of France and of Eu- 
rope in 1814 was, " Enough of him ; " " Assez de 
Bonaparte.^^ 

It was not Bonaparte's fault. He did all that 
in him lay to live and thrive without moral princi- 
ple. It was the nature of things, the eternal law 
of man and of the world which baulked and ruined 
him ; and the result, in a million experiments, will 
be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by 
individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, wiU 
fail. The pacific Fourier wiU be as inefiicient as 
the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civiliza- 
tion is essentially one of property, of fences, of ex- 
clusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our 
riches will leave us sick ; there will be bitterness in 
our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. 
Only that good profits which we can taste with 
all doors open, and which serves all men. 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 



Vll. 
GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 



I FIND a provision in the constitution of the 
world for the writer, or secretary, who is to report 
the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that every- 
where throbs and works. His office is a reception 
of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of 
the eminent and characteristic experiences. 

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged 
in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, 
goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock 
leaves its scratches on the mountain ; the river its 
channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the 
stratum ; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in 
the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in 
the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the 
snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters 
more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every 
act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of 
his fellows and in his own manners and face. The 
air is f uU of sounds ; the sky, of tokens ; the 
ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every 



250 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

object covered over with hints which speak to the 
intelligent. 

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and 
the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither 
exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature 
strives upward ; and, in man, the report is some- 
thing more than print of the seal. It is a new and 
finer form of the original. The record is alive, as 
that which it recorded is alive. In man, the mem- 
ory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received 
the images of surrounding objects, is touched with 
life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts 
do not lie in it inert ; but some subside and others 
shine ; so that soon we have a new picture, com- 
posed of the eminent experiejices. The man co- 
operates. He loves to communicate ; and that 
which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart 
until it is delivered. But, besides the universal 
joy of conversation, some men are born with exalted 
powers for this second creation. Men are born to 
write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and 
peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of 
plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. 
Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him 
as a model and sits for its picture. He counts 
it all nonsense that they say, that some things are 
undescribable. He believes that all that can be 
thought can be written, first or last ; and he would 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 251 

report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing 
so broad, so subtle, or so clear, but comes therefore 
commeiicled to his pen, and he will write. In his 
eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the 
universe is the possibility of being reported. In 
conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials ; 
as our German poet said, " Some god gave me the 
power to paint what I suffer." He draws his rents 
from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the 
power of talking wisely. Vexations and a tempest 
of passion only fill his sail ; as the good Luther 
writes, " When I am angry, I can pray well and 
preach well : " and, if we knew the genesis of fine 
strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complai- 
sance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some 
Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might 
see the spasms in the muscles of the neck. His 
failures are the preparation of his victories. A 
new thought or a crisis of passion apprises him 
that all that he has yet learned and written is ex- 
oteric, — is not the fact, but some rumor of the 
fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen ? 
No ; he begins again to describe in the new light 
which has shined on him, — if, by some means, he 
may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. 
Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still 
rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering 
organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and 



252 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

works, until at last it moulds them to its perfect 
will and is articulated. 

This striving after imitative expression, which 
one meets every where, is significant of the aim of 
nature, but is mere stenography. There are higher 
degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments 
for those whom she elects to a superior office ; for 
the class of scholars or writers, who see connection 
where the multitude see fragments, and who are 
impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to 
supply the axis on which the frame of things turns. 
Nature has deavly at heart the formation of the 
speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost 
sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of 
things. He is no permissive or accidental appear- 
ance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of 
the realm, provided and prepared from of old and 
from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture 
of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. 
There is a certain heat in the breast which attends 
the perception of a primary truth, which is the 
shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of 
the mine. Every thought which dawns on the 
mind, in the moment of its emergence announces 
its own rank, — whether it is some whimsy, or 
whether it is a power. 

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other 
iide, invitation and need enough of his gift. Soci- 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER, 253 

ety has, at all times, the same want, namely of one 
sane man with adequate powers of expression to 
hold up each object of monomania in its right rela- 
tions. The ambitious and mercenary bring their 
last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, rail- 
road, Romanism, mesmerism, or California ; and, by 
detaching the object from its relations, easily suc- 
ceed in making it seen in a glare ; and a multitude 
go mad about it, and they are not to be rej)roved 
or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept 
from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on 
another crotchet. But let one man have the com- 
prehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy 
in its right neighborhood and bearings, — the illu- 
sion vanishes, and the returning reason of the com- 
munity thanks the reason of the monitor. 

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must 
also wish with other men to stand well with his con- 
temporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among 
superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, 
which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. 
In this countr}'-, the emphasis of conversation and 
of public opinion commends the practical man ; 
and the solid portion of the community is named 
with significant respect in every circle. Our peo- 
ple are of Bonaparte's opinion concerning ideolo- 
gists. Ideas are subversive of social order and 
comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessore 



254 REPRESENT A TIVE MEN. 

It is believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from 
New York to Smyrna, or the running up and 
down to procure a company of subscribers to set 
a-going five or ten thousand spindles, or the ne- 
gotiations of a caucus and the practising on the 
prejudices and facility of country-people to secure 
their votes in November, — is practical and com- 
mendable. 

If I were to compare action of a much higher 
strain with a life of contemplation, I should not 
venture to pronounce with much confidence in fa- 
vor of the former. Mankind have such a deep 
stake in inward illumination, that there is much to 
be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his 
life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, 
a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which 
all action must pay. Act, if you like, — but you 
do it at your peril. Men's actions are too strong 
for them. Show me a man who has acted and who 
has not been the victim and slave of his action. 
What they have done commits and enforces them to 
do the same again. The first act, which was to be 
an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery re- 
former embodies his aspiration in some rite or cov- 
enant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and 
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established 
Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monas- 
tery and his dance; and although each prates of 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 255 

spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is 
anti-spiritual. But where are his new things of to- 
day ? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback ap- 
pears, but in those lower activities, which have no 
higher aim than to make us more comfortable and 
more cowardly ; in actions of cunning, actions that 
steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative 
from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason 
and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback 
and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred 
books, " Children only, and not the learned, speak 
of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. 
They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame 
end, and the place which is gained by the followers 
of the one is gained by the followers of the other. 
That man seeth,' who seeth that the speculative and 
the practical doctrines are one." For great action 
must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure 
of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. 
The greatest action may easily be one of the most 
private circumstance. 

This disparagement will not come from the lead- 
ers, but from inferior persons. The robust gentle- 
men who stand at the head of the practical class, 
share the ideas of the time, and have too much 
sympathy with the speculative class. It is not 
from men excellent in any kind that disparage- 
ment of any other is to be looked for. With such, 



256 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

Talleyrand's question is ever the main one ; not, is 
lie rich ? is he committed ? is he well-meaning ? has 
he this or that faculty ? is he of the movement ? is 
he of the establishment ? — but, Is he any hody f 
does he stand for something ? He must be good 
of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that 
State-street, all that the common-sense of mankind 
asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but 
as you know. Able men do not care in what kind 
a man is able, so only that he is able. A master 
likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be 
orator, artist, craftsman, or king. 

Society has really no graver interest than the 
well-being of the literary class. And it is not to 
be denied that men are cordial in their recognition 
and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still 
the writer does not stand with us on any command- 
ing ground. I think this to be his own fault. A 
pound passes for a pound. There have been times 
when he was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles, 
the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic songs. 
Sibylline verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sen- 
tences, inscribed on temple walls. Every word was 
true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote 
without levity and without choice. Every word 
was carved before his eyes into the earth and the 
sky ; and the sun and stars were only letters of the 
same purport and of no more necessity. But how 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 257 

can he be honored when he does not honor himself ; 
when he loses himself in the crowd ; when he is no 
longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to 
the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he 
must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad 
government, or must bark, all the year round, in 
opposition ; or write conventional criticism, or prof- 
ligate novels ; or at any rate write without thought, 
and without recurrence by day and by night to the 
sources of inspiration ? 

Some reply to these questions may be furnished 
by looking over the list of men of literary gen- 
ius in our age. Among these no more instructive 
name occurs than that of Goethe to represent the 
powers and duties of the scholar or writer. 

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the 
popular external life and aims of the nineteenth 
century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man 
quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, 
enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, 
and taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach 
of weakness which but for him would lie on the 
intellectual works of the period. He appears at a 
time when a general culture has spread itself and 
has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; 
when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social 
comfort and co-operation have come in. There is 
no poet, but scores of poetic writers ; no Colum- 

VOU IV 17 



258 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

bus, but hundreds of post-captains, with transit- 
telescope, barometer and concentrated soup and 
pemmican ; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any 
number of clever parliamentary and forensic de- 
baters ; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divin- 
ity ; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap 
press, reading-rooms and book-clubs without num- 
ber. There was never such a miscellany of facts. 
The world extends itself like American trade. We 
conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle 
Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair ; but 
modern life to respect a multitude of things, wliich 
is distracting. 

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity ; 
hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to 
cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sci- 
ences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them 
with ease ; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the 
variety of coats of convention with which life had 
got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce 
these and to draw his strength from nature, with 
which he lived in full communion. What is 
strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty 
state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Ger- 
many played no such leading part in the world's 
affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any 
metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a 
French, or English, or once, a Koman or Attio 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 259 

genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limita- 
tion in his muse. He is not a debtor to his position, 
but was born with a free and controlling genius. 

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a 
philosophy of literature set in poetry ; the work of 
one who found himself the master of histories, my» 
thologies, philosophies, sciences and national litera° 
tures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which mod- 
ern erudition, with its international intercourse of 
the whole earth's population, researches into In- 
dian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, 
chemistry, astronomy ; and every one of these king- 
doms assuming a certain aerial and poetic charac- 
ter, by reason of the multitude. One looks at a 
king with reverence ; but if one should chance to 
be at a congress of kings, the eye would take liber- 
ties with the peculiarities of each. These are not 
wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms to which 
the poet has confided the results of eighty years of 
observation. This reflective and critical wisdom 
makes the poem more truly the flower of this time. 
It dates itself. Still he is a poet, — poet of a 
prouder laurel than any contemporary, and, under 
this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out 
of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a 
hero's strength and grace. 

The wonder of the book is its superior intelli- 
gence. In tke menstruum of this man's wit, the 



260 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

past and the present ages, and their religions, pol- 
itics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into 
archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail 
through his head ! The Greeks said that Alexan- 
der went as far as Chaos ; Goethe went, only the 
other day, as far ; and one step farther he hazarded, 
and brought himself safe back. 

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his specula- 
tion. The immense horizon which journeys with 
us lends its majesty to trifles and to matters of 
convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal 
performances. He was the soul of his century. If 
that- was learned, and had become, by population, 
compact organization and drill of parts, one great 
Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts 
and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing savans 
to classify, — this man*s mind had ample chambers 
for the distribution of all. He had a power to 
unite the detached atoms again by their own law. 
He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. 
Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius 
of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close 
beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose 
we ascribe to the age was only another of his 
masks : — 

" His very flight is presence in disguise : " 
— that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 261 

dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in 
Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or An- 
tioch. He sought him in public squares and main 
streets, in boulevards and hotels ; and, in the solid- 
est kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed 
the lurking daemonic power ; that, in actions of 
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins it- 
self : and this, by tracing the pedigree of every 
usage and practice, every institution, utensil and 
means, home to its origin in the structure of man. 
He had an extreme impatience of conjecture and 
of rhetoric. " I have guesses enough of my own ; 
if a man write a book, let him set down only what 
he knows." He writes in the plainest and lowest 
tone, omitting a great deal more than he writes, 
and putting ever a thing for a word. He has ex- 
plained the distinction between the antique and 
the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its 
scope and laws. He has said the best tilings about 
nature that ever were said. He treats nature as 
the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did, 
— and, with whatever loss of French tabulation 
and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us ; 
and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes are bet- 
ter on the whole than telescopes or microscopeso 
He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, 
through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in 
his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea 



262 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf 
is the unit of botany, and that every part of the 
plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new con- 
dition ; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may 
be converted into any other organ, and any other 
organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he 
assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be 
considered as the unit of the skeleton : the head 
was only the uppermost vertebrse transformed. 
" The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last 
with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, 
the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes 
with the head. Man and the higher animals are 
built up through the vertebrae, the powers being 
concentrated in the head." In optics again he re- 
jected the artificial theory of seven colors, and con- 
sidered that every color was the mixture of light 
and darkness in new proportions. It is really of 
very little consequence what topic he writes upon. 
He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravita- 
tion towards truth. He will realize what you say. 
He hates to be trifled with and to be made to say 
over again some old wife's fable that has had pos- 
session of men's faith these thousand years. He 
may as well see if it is true as another. He sifts 
it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and 
judge of these things. "Why should I take them 
on trust ? And therefore what he says of religion, 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 263 

of passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, 
of paper-money, of periods of belief, of omens, of 
luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten. 

Take the most remarkable example that could 
occur of this tendency to verify every term in pop- 
ular use. The Devil had played an important part 
in mythology in all times. Goethe would have no 
word that does not cover a thing. The same meas= 
ure will still serve : " I have never heard of any 
crime which I might not have committed." So he 
flies at the throat of this imp. He shall be real ; 
he shall be modern ; he shall be European ; he shall 
dress like a gentleman, and accept the manners, 
and walk in the streets, and be well initiated in the 
life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820, — or he 
shall not exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of 
mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon 
tail, brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking 
in books and pictures, looked for him in his own 
mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness and 
unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude, darkens over 
the human thought, — and found that the portrait 
gained reality and terror by every thing he added 
and by every thing he took away. He found that 
the essence of this hobgoblin which had hovered 
in shadow about the habitations of men ever since 
there were men, was pure intellect, applied, — as 
always there is a tendency, — to the service of 



264 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

the senses : and he flung into literature, in his Me- 
phistopheles, the first organic figure that has been 
added for some ages, and which will remain as long 
as the Prometheus. 

I have no design to enter into any analysis of 
his numerous works. They consist of translations, 
criticism, dramas, lyric and every other description 
of poems, literary journals and portraits of distin- 
guished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the 
" Wilhelm Meister." 

"Wilhelm Meister" is a novel in every sense, 
the first of its kind, called by its admirers the only 
delineation of modern society, — as if other nov- 
els, those of Scott for example, dealt with costume 
and condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a 
book over which some veil is still drawn. It is 
read by very intelligent persons with wonder and 
delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, 
as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this 
century can compare with it in its delicious sweet- 
ness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying 
it with so many and so solid thoughts, just in- 
sights into life and manners and characters; so 
many good hints for the conduct of life, so many 
unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and 
never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very 
provoking book to the curiosity of young men of 
genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 265 

light reading, those who look in it for the enter 
tainment they find in a romance, are disappointed. 
On the other hand, those who begin it with the 
higher hope to read in it a v/orthy history of 
genius, and the just award of the laurel to its 
toils and denials, have also reason to complain. 
We had an English romance here, not long ago, 
professing to embody the hope of a new age and 
to unfold the political hope of the party called 
' Young England,' — in which the only reward 
of virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. 
Goethe's romance has a conclusion as lame and 
immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its con- 
tinuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified 
picture. In the progress of the story, the char- 
acters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate 
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic 
convention : they quit the society and habits of 
their rank, tiiey lose their wealth, they become 
the servants of great ideas and of the most gen- 
erous social ends; until at last the hero, who is 
the centre and fountain of an association for the 
rendering of the noblest benefits to the human 
race, no longer answers to his own titled name ; 
it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. " I am 
only man," he says ; " I breathe and work for 
man ; " and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices, 
J Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has so many weak- 



266 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

nesses and impurities and keeps such bad com- 
j)any, that the sober English public, when the 
book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it 
is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of 
the world and with knowledge of laws; the per- 
sons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few 
strokes, and not a word too much, — the book re- 
mains ever so new and unexliausted, that we must 
even let it go its way and be willing to get what 
good from it we can, assured that it has only 
begun its office and has millions of readers yet to 
serve. 

The argument is the passage of a democrat to 
the aristocracy, using both words in their best 
sense. And this passage is not made in any mean 
or creeping way, but through the hall door. Na- 
ture and character assist, and the rank is made 
real by sense and probity in the nobles. No gen- 
erous youth can escape this charm of reality in 
the book, so that it is higUy stimulating to intel- 
lect and courage. 

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the 
book as " thorouglily modern and prosaic ; the ro- 
mantic is completely levelled in it; so is the po- 
etry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats 
only of the ordinary affairs of men : it is a poet' 
icized civic and domestic story. The wonderful 
in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusi< 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 267 

astic dreaming : " — and yet, what is also charac- 
teristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and 
it remained his favorite reading to the end of his 
life. 

What distinguishes Goethe for French and 
English readers is a property which he shares 
with his nation, — a habitual reference to interior 
truth. In England and in America there is a 
respect for talent ; and, if it is exerted in support 
of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, 
or in regular opposition to any, the public is satis- 
fied. In France there is even a greater delight 
in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And 
in all these countries, men of talent write from 
talent. It is enough if the understanding is oc- 
cupied, the taste propitiated, — so many columns, 
so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable 
way. The German intellect wants the French 
sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of 
the English, and the American adventure ; but it 
has a certain probity, which never rests in a su- 
perficial performance, but asks steadily. To what 
end? A German public asks for a controlling 
sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what 
is it for ? What does the man mean ? Whence, 
whence all these thoughts ? 

Talent alone can not make a writer. There 
must be a man behind the book ; a personality 



268 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

which by bu*th and quality is pledged to the doc- 
trines there set forth, and which exists to see and 
state things so, and not otherwise ; holding things 
because they are things. If he cannot rightly 
express himself to-day, the same things subsist 
and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies 
the burden on his mind, — the burden of truth 
to be declared, — more or less understood ; and it 
constitutes his business and calling in the world 
to see those facts through, and to make them 
known. What signifies that he trips and stam- 
mers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that 
his method or his tropes are inadequate? That 
message will find method and imagery, articulation 
and melody. Though he were dumb it would 
speak. If not, — if there be no such God's word 
in the man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent, 
how brilliant he is ? 

It makes a great difference to the force of any 
sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. 
In the learned journal, in the influential news- 
paper, I discern no form; only some irresponsi- 
ble shadow ; oftener some moneyed corporation, or 
some dangler who hopes, in the mask and robes of 
his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through 
every clause and part of speech of a right book I 
meet the eyes of the most determined of men ; his 
force and terror inundate every word • the commas 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 269 

and dashes are alive ; so that the writing is athletic 
and nimble, — can go far and live long. 

In England and America, one may be an adept 
in the writings of a Greek or Latin poet, without 
any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent 
years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a pre- 
sumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under- 
values the fashions of his town. But the German 
nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these 
subjects : the student, out of the lecture-room, still 
broods on the lessons ; and the professor can not 
divest himself of the fancy that the truths of phi- 
losophy have some application to Berlin and Mu- 
nich. This earnestness enables them to outsee 
men of much more talent. Hence almost all the 
valuable distinctions which are current in higher 
conversation have been derived to us from Ger- 
many. But whilst men distinguished for wit and 
learning, in England and France, adopt their study 
and their side with a certain levity, and are not 
understood to be very deeply engaged, from 
grounds of character, to the topic or the part they 
espouse, — Goethe, the head and body of the Ger- 
man nation, does not speak from talent, but the 
truth shines through : he is very wise, though his 
talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent 
his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. 
It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable 



270 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

independence which converse with truth gives : 
hear you, or forbear, his fact abides ; and your in- 
terest in the writer is not confined to his story and 
he dismissed from memory when he has performed 
his task creditably, as a baker when he has left his 
loaf ; but his work is the least part of him. The 
old Eternal Genius who built the world has con- 
fided himseK more to this man than to any other. 

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the high- 
est grounds from which genius has spoken. He 
has not worshipped the highest unity ; he is inca- 
pable of a self -surrender to the moral sentiment. 
There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has 
sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose 
tone is purer and more touches the heart. Goethe 
can never be dear to men. His is not even the 
devotion to pure truth ; but to truth for the sake of 
culture. He has no aims less large than the con- 
quest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be 
his portion : a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, 
nor overawed ; of a stoical self-command and self- 
denial, and having one test for all men, — What 
can you teach me f All possessions are valued by 
him for that only ; rank, privileges, health, time, 
Being itself. 

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts 
"ind sciences and events; artistic^, but not artist; 
spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 271 

had not right to know : there is no weapon in the 
armory of universal genius he did not take into 
his hand, but with peremptory heed that he should 
not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. 
He lays a ray of light under every fact, and be- 
tween himself and his dearest property. From 
him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The 
lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw 
the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took 
form. " Piety itseK is no aim, but only a means 
whereby through purest inward peace we may at- 
tain to highest culture." And his penetration of 
every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still 
more statuesque. His affections help him, like wo- 
men employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of 
conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of 
him you may be, — if so you shall teach him aught 
which your good-will cannot, were it only what ex- 
perience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and 
welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot 
hate any body ; his time is worth too much. Tem- 
peramental antagonisms may be suffered, but like 
feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across 
kingdoms. 

His autobiography, under the title of " Poetry 
and Truth out of my Life," is the expression of 
the idea, — now familiar to the world through the 
German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and 



272 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

New, when that book appeared, — that a man ex- 
ists for culture ; not for what he can accomplish, 
but for what can be accomplished in him. The 
reaction of things on the man is the only note- 
worthy result. An intellectual man can see him- 
self as a third person ; therefore his faults and de- 
lusions interest him equally with his successes. 
Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes 
more to know the history and destiny of man ; 
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him 
are only interested in a low success. 

This idea reigns in the "Dichtung und Wahr- 
heit " and directs the selection of the incidents ; 
and nowise the external importance of events, the 
rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of 
course the book affords slender materials for what 
would be reckoned with us a "Life of Goethe;" — 
few dates, no correspondence, no details of offices 
or employments, no light on his marriage ; and a 
period of ten years, that shoidd be the most active 
in Ms life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk 
in silence. Meantime certain love-affairs that came 
to nothing, as people say, have the strangest impor- 
tance : he crowds us with details : — certain whim- 
sical opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own 
invention, and especially his relations to remarka- 
ble minds and to critical epochs of thought : — 
these he magnifies. His " Daily aud Yearly Jour* 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 273 

naJ," his " Italian Travels," his " Campaign in 
France " and the historical part of his " Theory of 
Colors," have the same interest. In the last, he 
rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, New- 
ton, Voltaire, &c. ; and the charm of this portion of 
the book consists in the simplest statement of the 
relation betwixt these grandees of European scien- 
tific history and himself ; the mere drawing of the 
lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Ba- 
con, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the 
line is, for the time and person, a solution of the 
formidable problem, and gives pleasure when Iph- 
igenia and Faust do not, without any cost of inven- 
tion comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust. 

This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it 
that he knew too much, that his sight was micro- 
scopic and interfered with the just perspective, the 
seeing of the whole ? He is fragmentary ; a writer 
of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sen- 
tences. When he sits down to write a drama or a 
tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a 
hundred sides, and combines them into the body as 
fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorpo- 
rate : this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, 
leaves from their journals, or the like. A great 
deal stiU is left that will not find any place. This 
the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to ; and 
hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his 

voi:« IV. 18 



274 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, 
aphorisms, X^enien^ &c. 

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out 
of the calculations of self-culture. It was the in- 
firmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the 
world out of gratitude ; who knew where libraries, 
galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and lei- 
sure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust 
the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Soc- 
rates loved Athens ; Montaigne, Paris ; and Ma- 
dame de Stael said she was only vulnerable on that 
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable as- 
pect. All the geniuses are usually so ill assorted 
and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere 
else. We seldom see any body who is not uneasy 
or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame 
on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a 
spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at 
home and happy in his century and the world. 
None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed 
the game. In this aim of culture, which is the 
genius of his works, is their power. The idea of 
absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my 
own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender 
to the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher ; but 
compared with any motives on which books are 
written in England and America, this is very truth, 
and has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. 



GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER 275 

Thus has he brought back to a book some of its 
ancient might and dignity. 

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and 
country, when original talent was oppressed under 
the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and 
the distracting variety of claims, taught men how 
to dispose of this momitaiuous miscellany and make 
it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being 
both representatives of the impatience and reaction 
of nature against the morgue of conventions, — two 
stern realists, who, with their scholars, have sever- 
ally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and 
seeming, for this time and for all time. This cheer- 
ful laborer, with no external popularity or provoca- 
tion, drawing his motive and his plan from his own 
breast, tasked himself with stints for a giant, and 
without relaxation or rest, except by alternating 
his pursuits, worked on for eighty years with the 
steadiness of his first zeal. 

It is the last lesson of modern science that the 
highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by 
few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man 
is the most composite of all creatures ; the wheel- 
insect, volvox glohator, is at the other extreme. 
We shall learn to draw rents and revenues from 
the immense patrimony of the old and the recent 
ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence 
of all times ; that the disadvantages of any epoch 



/ 

CrLQ 
276 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. ^^^ 

exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers 
with his sunshine and music close by the darkest 
and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will 
hold on men or hours. The world is young : the 
former great men caU to us affectionately. We 
too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens 
and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to 
suffer no fiction to exist for us ; to realize all that 
we know ; in the high refinement of modern life, 
in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good 
faith, reality and a purpose ; and first, last, midst 
and without end, to honor every truth by use. 



